Everyday Reflections

I started a new section in my blog to write short stories that I narrate to my kid. These are mostly picked and minced from collective learning and observations which I pick around me.

Like any normal parents , we also at every stage have tried to give our growing boy a cycle so that he could paddle his way through by-lanes and street…get essence of his early childhood. As he started to grow , we always would upgrade him ( I guess until now 3 times ) .. with a cycle to suit his age so that he could move away from a 4 wheeled to 3 .. to 2 … 1 ( I am not sure of ) !

While it was all fun with support wheels for us as parents who did not put any effort for giving him human support , he would wheel around , but things slowly started to turn bitter when we raised the support wheels to be up in air and he tried to balance. He would balance and sometimes fall down. Not sure of other kids but mine is sensitive to hurting his ego to an extent of renouncing doing something !

We used to live in rented set-up where there were bunch of families without a campus around it so opportunity for us to make him practice were limited…while one fine day we decided to shift to a more colony like scene where my kid could play around a bit with his own aged one’s.

While we met our new social circle and got introduced to them , there were other kids who would cycle around confidently and then there was mine who would do it with four wheels. Typical of Indian culture advise started to flow in on how to get him off the blocks and how it required us to get involved for him to learn cycling on two wheels.

Time passed by , my kid gained a regular evening playing schedule. Sometimes we would go down for a stroll and see our kid running behind his own cycle as within the group these kids would ride what is not there own ! One day we did try to make him learn , and practice but he was not able to balance and got annoyed… In coming weeks I did not see any request for giving cycle for evening play and it started to gather dust…

After couple of weeks though the trend picked up again and now he started to ride … one quite evening on a weekend we were sitting sipping our tea cuppa when an elated set of kids led by my own boy entered the house shouting “I did it .. I did it”

What happened … a typical reaction and then the narration started .. that he is now able to ride his friend’s cycle which means he can ride his and took two rounds … he had learned to balance himself on a cycle .. he had learned to ride a bicycle !!

Moral Of The Story : Friends are important and they nudge you .. so having good company and picking things from each other makes them good human beings ! This is the real social network !