The Olympics - Cycling and Disc Golf

This year, the kids were old enough for a real bicycle race, so we took them over to a bike trail at a nearby park.  Brian rode with the kids, but it would have been better if I could have ridden too, because there was definitely a fast group and a slow group.  Here they all are at the starting line:

And they're off!  Natalie took an early lead.  I am impressed that she can ride while standing up on the pedals!  I also thought it was cute that they made numbers to go on the back of their shirts.

Megan was a good sport about riding, even though she was much much slower than everyone else:

Becky and I walked down the path with Nathaniel and waited for the kids to come back.  Natalie and Amelia were the first to head back, with Natalie far in the lead.  She was going by so fast that I couldn't get a good photo of her:

We were wondering what was keeping Noah, but it turned out that both Noah and Megan had crashed their bikes trying to go down a hill and around a corner too fast.  They both had scrapes on their knees and elbows, but got up and kept cycling.

Megan even kept pedaling most of the way up this hill, which she did (unusually) with no complaining.

Natalie won the bike race quite handily, and then it was time to move on to disc golf.  They took a few practice shots at the first hole.

Then it was time to walk over to the shady holes.

It was really fun to watch them play.  They basically threw the disc, ran to where it had landed, and threw it again immediately.  We figured out about halfway through that they thought it was a race to see who could get the disc in the basket the fastest, not who took the fewest number of throws to get in the basket.  So that explained a lot.

Amelia is celebrating getting the disc in the basket after about six throws.

I had brought two of Ben's real discs, and they threw a lot straighter and more accurately than the cheap free frisbies that the Weidners had.  We took turns using the good discs so that everyone would have a chance with them. 

Nathaniel had his own method of getting the disc in the basket:

I tortured the kids by making them line up so I could take a group photo.  They were thrilled to cooperate, as always.

So I let them do some funny poses afterwards:

I asked Nathaniel to name all the people in this picture, and he could say everyone's names until he got to Natalie.  He looked at her, grunted, and stuck his thumb in his mouth.  I think he doesn't know how to say Natalie's name.  Nathaniel had a great time hanging out with Brian; he really warmed up to Brian quickly and was happy to hold his hand and let Brian carry him around.  Nathaniel doesn't usually warm up to other people very quickly at all, so it was really sweet to see how much he liked Uncle Brian.