As I mentioned earlier, we got Nora a balance bike for her birthday. Although I thought she might be just a bit too small for it now, by spring/summer, it will be a great thing for her to have. In the meantime, Jonah has really done a lot of practicing on it. He started out just walking it slowly up and down the hallway, then got brave enough to start lifting up his feet for a few seconds at a time. After about two weeks, he was too good to be riding it in the house at all, and the weather has warmed enough at times in the past week or so that we’ve spent some nice chunks of time, watching him ride up and down the sidewalk. Since our road slopes very slightly downward, he can get some pretty good coasting going on, and can even ride the bike the length of the whole block without touching his feet to the ground. Also just in the past few days, he’s been practicing turning off into the driveway and trying to circle around without putting his feet down.

While all that has been going on, Nora has been enjoying Jonah’s Christmas gift of a Plasmacar. The idea with this car is that you can power it along just by turning the steering wheel repeatedly left and right, while your feet are resting up on it (you’ll see her do this in the video). Most of the time, she likes to push it along with her legs, and she is getting very good at the whole steering thing, even when backing up.

And the video…