We spent an Easter in Tennessee with my daughter, son-in-law, and two grandsons when the boys were quite young. The spring weather was amazing, and we spent most of our time outdoors. We spent a lot of our time riding bikes, trikes, scooters, all kinds of toys with wheels. There was a long steep driveway that provided us with a great place to race each other downhill and around a corner.
The boys took turns on the tricycle and the Big Wheel. It seemed as though the Big Wheel was faster and it became THE toy to ride down the hill. That Big Wheel looked like so much fun, the adults decided to try the child’s toy. I gave it a go and laughed the entire way down the hill. My daughter took it for a spin and we were all laughing so hard tears were flowing. My son-in-law jumped on the Big Wheel. He found that his legs were too long and his feet wouldn’t fit on the petals, so he decided to put his feet on the seat, hands on the handlebars, and headed down the hill squatting down as low as he could go. About three-quarters of the way down, he jumped off the Big Wheel, landed on his feet, and ran the rest of the way down the hill as he was pulled by his momentum. Next it was my husband’s turn. He decided to stand on the seat of Big Wheel while he bent over the handlebars… thinking it might be easier to jump off. As he began down the hill, the entire Big wheel stared to ‘speed wobble’. The ‘wobble’ started small, then the entire Big Wheel wobbled violently. Thinking the Big Wheel was about to fall apart, he decided to dismount by doing a barrel roll. Next thing we knew he flew over the handlebars, tucked, and rolled down the hill. Before he even stopped rolling, my daughter, (dressed in a bright orange shirt) sprinted by me, like a human caution cone. Before any of us could do anything, he popped up on his feet and jogged in a circle. We all tried to make sure he was okay before we started laughing so hard we couldn’t even talk. He tried to get on a bike, and ride around with the boys… as he was trying to turn, he realized that his left arm didn’t work right, and he couldn’t raise it above his head. Our next stop… Urgent Care. We made it a family affair and spent the next three hours learning that my husband had torn his pectoral muscle and needed to wear a sling for the next sixty days.
As we headed back to the Carolinas, I told him as he had to address the board of directors and any and all the members of the credit union that came to the ‘Annual Meeting’ that week, that he had a ‘little bike accident’. Of course, if they asked questions, he would need to fess up that his ‘little bike accident” was on a Big Wheel.
That day when we rode the children’s Big Wheel, was funny!… It was really funny…. until someone got hurt.
“The fool finds his fun in doing wrong, but the wise delight in having discernment.” Proverbs 10:23
Riding a child’s toy down a steep hill was fun, but not what we should have been doing. After our trip to the ER, and my husband was put in a sling, we continued to play, but we all rode bikes and toys that were age appropriate.
