At last!!! Bike riding Part III

Rewind to last spring. I was asking around about bike riding and then it finally happened. I hit the jackpot of information! I had emailed a professor at MSU. She runs the Kinesiology program at MSU that Daniel has been swimming in since he was 6 years old. He just turned 12. I'll write about this another time. . . this was one of those times when you realize you just have to keep asking. She had JUST returned from a conference and received a ton of information on the very subject of bike riding. YES!!!!! She sent me to a website. http://www.losethetrainingwheels.org/. I immediately went to the site and what was laid out before me was sensory overload to the max!! This was exactly what I'd been looking for! I knew it was the answer for us. They travel all over the country running camps for kids with special needs to teach them how to ride a bike in a one week training, that is intense. I look at it as ripping off the bandaid. I knew it was going to be tough, but one week of hell weighed against possible years of frustrating teaching, and hauling Daniel around on a tandem that we would probably need to buy. . . I couldn't borrow that beautiful bike forever!



After reading and learning all the things we had been doing wrong and what actually worked I went right to the schedule of camps. Typed in Michigan. . . one camp came up. ONE! It was in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. This is about 75 miles from us. A suburb of Detroit. Which means horrible traffic. It is the car capital of the country right? I lived there, one of the reasons we left was the traffic. Oye. This wasn't going to be pretty. I signed up right away. The camp was the 3rd week in June. So far so good. No vacations planned that week, nothing on the schedule. You could pick what session you wanted. There were two in the morning, and two in the afternoon. This is a very important choice. I'm sure most parents have this, but with our kids (meaning kids on the spectrum) we need to make sure all of the stars are aligned properly. So the time was important. I chose the 10:30 to 11:55 time slot. Thinking we could leave by 9:00 am. Not too early. We could have a fairly relaxed (or at least on the surface, I would be a mess inside!) morning, of getting up, eating a good breakfast, driving to Bloomfield Hills and most importantly missing the morning commute!



Driving distances is not on Daniel's list of favorite things. Whenever we get into a car the first question is, "how long is this going to take?" So I knew that I had some work to do to, in the words of Tim Gunn, "make it work". But that's what I do right? That is my job. That is why I constantly have these scenarios running over and over in my head. I figure out how to make it work. We found the answer, we signed up, now we get to "make it work". I wish I was as fabulous as Tim Gunn somehow he always seems to know how to make it work. Me? I need some time to figure it out and figure out how Zachary fits into this week.