Monday, September 15, 2008

Riding in the Park

Sunday we took Ian took to one of the parks by the Han river. They are all called Hangang Park (Han River Park). He practiced riding his bike. He has a Strider Balance Bike. Balance bikes do not have pedals or training wheels. The theory is that training wheels do not teach balance. With the balance bike, kids teach themselves to balance and then it is easier to move to a regular bike with pedals and without training wheels. We are trying to get him out more to practice. It is still pretty hot, but not as miserable as before. You can see in the first part of the video that he is standing up and walking the bike, but the second part, he sits and pushes and does well with the balance. He still has a long way to go before he is ready to try a regular bike, but it is fun to watch him. Plus, the bike only weighs 7 lbs (if I remember correctly) so it is nice and light.

3 comments:

Connie said...

Look at him go! He's doing great! I also love the reactions of everybody he passed too. If the guy on the 2nd bike had craned his neck any further, he'd have flipped himself over! :-) Since you posted about Ian's bike, I have seen a couple of kids on them here. Bigger kids, like Honor's age on bigger, wooden, bikes. They are like sit-down scooters and the kids seem to enjoy them very much.

Mama Seoul said...

The premiere balance bike is over $300 made from wood in Germany. I went with aluminium, because I didn't want to pay that much for the premium wood bike and the cheaper wood bikes did not get reviewed as highly.

Connie said...

I haven't looked at the specs, but the wooden ones look HEAVY compared to Ian's ... and they definitely do not come in awesome color!