Bike Meet Car
We have been spending a lot more time outside. It’s hard to wrangle three kids of varying skills, especially when they all want to be in the street. Since my 7 year old daughter E and 5 year old son C basically know what they are doing on the bike, I mostly just let them be unless they are not following the rules of the road. This leaves me glued to my 2 year old son L since he is wild.
One weekend afternoon, we were all outside except for my wife. I was giving her a break and the kids just wanted to ride around the neighborhood. Of course they wanted to ride in the street. Both E and C were riding around faster and faster going up the street and down the street. There was a bit of a hill , but I thought nothing of it since I was mainly trying to watch L.
All of a sudden, I heard a big crash and a lot of crying. I was freaked out because I thought E got hit by a car. It definitely sounded that loud and the crash sounded bad. I ran around the corner so fast with L so I could see what happened.
Luckily, E did not get hit by a car. Her bike did meet a car though and she somehow ran into it while cruising down the street fast. She claimed she tried to turn around right then and wasn’t careful enough. I was both relieved and frustrated because it was something that she should’ve known better to avoid. It was such a narrow part of the road where she was trying to turn around and she should’ve went a little bit further so she had the whole road to do that.
I also looked at the neighbor’s car to see if E left any dents or scratches. The car looked fine and a few days later when I saw the neighbors, I mentioned it to them. I said if they saw anything, please give me a call and I will take care of any damage. They were really nice about it and sympathetic. They didn’t want us to worry about the car which they said was fine. They were also glad that E was mostly ok.
A few days later, E was back to her normal self. That far and crash could’ve been a lot worse and I’m very relieved that she bounced back so quickly. Hopefully she learned her lesson through the crash and hopefully my boys learn learned the lesson from observing. I’m honestly surprised it wasn’t C that did that and parenthood has a way of keeping you guessing.
