On Tuesday morning, I  brought home my old (and I mean old) Schwinn unicycle, thinking, maybe someday I'll learn how to ride the darn thing. It has spent the last several years in a basement in Lawrenceville, New Jersey.

No sooner was it in the house than Yael became interested. On went her helmet, and chaos ensued…

After two days, she's actually better at it than I am.

I write about this not to bore you with father's pride (OK, a little) but to give you a sense of all the wild and wonderful "Wheees" there are for our kids out there. Unicycling, like other activities that require extreme balance, is an incredible workout. It develops the muscles that weight training hardly touches. The muscles that can save us from injury if we slip and fall. The muscles that keep us aligned so we don't develop chronic aches and pains from mis-use.

You can't cheat on a unicycle. You're either in perfect alignment, or you're on your butt.

I'll chronicle Yael's progress on this blog. Here's a (very!) short video clip of today's practice session (indoors, as it was slippery wet outside):