The Severed Cortex

I'm a week behind on this posting about our latest time together. The time before, on the way home, Robert mentioned that his bicycle had a flat tire. I told him we'd fix it the next time we hung out ... which was last Saturday.

I picked him up around 9:30 or so and we went to eat breakfast first. I offered him the choice of several places to eat and he chose the Sunrise Diner in Edwardsville. For some reason, he liked the name. As is usually the case for a Saturday morning, The Sunrise was crowded, however we were able to sit at one of the two person tables right away. After looking at the menu for awhile Robert decided he wanted cold cereal. I know I could have just let him get that, but it seemed silly to just get cold cereal. After a couple of minutes, I talked him into getting something else. He settled on french toast with sausage and ham, but after the order was placed he told me he didn't really like french toast. I said maybe this french toast would be different, but it wasn't. He didn't like it all that much and we wound up taking it home in a box. He did eat the ham and some of the sausage. I had an omelette and an order of bacon.

We headed over to our house to start working on the bike. Basically I sort of directed him what to do. He found a box end wrench that fit the nut on the front wheel and I explained the concept of 'righty tighty, lefty loosey'. He picked it up quickly and although he couldn't tighten the nuts down as tightly as they needed to be, he did very well. Once we got the tire off and the tube out, we figured out where the hole was. It appeared that we could patch it so we went down the street to The Cyclery to get a patch kit. We also goofed around and looked at all the bikes in the store. It turns out that the patch wouldn't work though. The hole in the tube was next to the seam and no matter how much we tried, the patch wouldn't sit flush against the hole and the air would leak out. We even tried letting the patch stay on for almost an hour before filling it with air (we played Tekken 3 on PS2 while we waited), but that didn't work either. So, we went to Target to get a new tube. Once we got the tube in and the wheel back on, we went to Quik Trip to fill it up. The tire held air so we drove over to Glik Park to test it out. The first time around the sidewalk Robert had no problem. I told him I'd time him for the second time around to see how long it would take him. It didn't take me long to figure out something was wrong because it was taking him longer to make it around. A few minutes later he came walking up to me crying. Turns out he lost control of the bike and fell off. I asked him to sit in the truck while I went to get his bike (it was all the way over on the other side of the park). By the time I got back he seemed to be fine, other than a few scratches. As you can imagine, he didn't want to ride the bike anymore.

Luckily, Edwardsville was having a Route 66 celebration so we headed over there to check that out. For the most part it was kind of boring, but there were some of those big bouncy things that the kids like to play on. One was a giant slide, one was just a bouncy thing, and the other was an obstacle course. Robert went on each one of them twice and declared the obstacle course the best one. He also liked the slide because instead of sliding you could hop on your butt all the way down. We ate some kettle corn that was fresh popped and washed it all down with some of the best homemade lemonade I've ever had. (Mai Lee still wins for best lemonade ever). By this time it was almost 5:00 in the afternoon so I took him home. All in all a good time for everyone and hopefully a learning experience for him. I mean a kid should know how to fix his own bike, right?