Birthday Gift - Early and Late

This fall we realized both kids would need new bikes by next summer.  Maddie started riding mine a lot more and Jake was barely fitting his 16 inch bike.  We offered that, for their birthdays, we would buy them a bike.  Most kids, we thought, would be thrilled.  Not ours.  After much discussion we finally learned that they would be happy to get a bike, but they really wanted to be surprised.  They didn't want to know ahead of time.

This turned into more of a debate because a bike was not something we wanted to pick out for them at this point.  They both have strong opinions on what they like/dislike and it changes with the wind.  In the end we actually had to convince them this would be fun or at least fun to get in the end.

There's something wrong with that.

Since the fall when we sold Jake's bike in our garage sale, we have been searching.  Two criteria were involved:  he had to like it and it had to be in our budget.  He liked a lot of bikes for which we were not willing to pay.  We did find a couple orange bikes, but a giant must for Jake was that it had to have brakes at the handle and he really wanted to be able to pedal backwards. 

Monday night Mike saw the Menard's ad and said he thought he'd found Jake's bike.  He showed it to Jake who said as long as it could pedal backwards he was good with it.

Mike visited Menard's and the bike was chained to a post AND had a bike lock.  He told the salesguy he wasn't buying the bike unless he could see if it could pedal backward so the guy had to cut the chain.

Menard's hasn't realized that a better sell is not chaining it to a post, but offering free assembly.  It comes in a box.  Last night assembly took place in the front entry. 

Seems like an awful lot of tools for a bike assembly.  We had to pull out the big guns for lighting too.

But it's together.  One gift down and a month early.  Maddie is still waiting on her bike.  It's currently five months late.  We've tried several times to get her a bike.  But either she doesn't fit the 24 inch bike, doesn't like the color/style, or doesn't fit the 26-inch bike. 

We decided we prefer and miss the time when they didn't have an opinion.