Next stop, Tour de France

Monkey has been outside pedalling up and down for all he's worth every afternoon this week. Around Wednesday, I raised his training wheels again, and I think we're taking them off this afternoon. He sings to himself as he goes along, totally intoxicated by this new power and speed.

(In related news, I think I need to find a tiny walking bike on Craigslist for Mabel. Something tells me she'd love it. Yesterday when we met a new neighbour, of course Monkey had to show off his prowess, but Mabel kept interjecting: "I can run weeally fast.")

This week Monkey asked to try some apple, and said it was yummy. The next day he didn't want it, but he ate some dry-roasted edamame and liked those too. If you'd ever seen him refuse to even look at a new food, or have it on the table near him, never mind innocuously on his plate, you'd know what a great thing this is. 

Mabel and I went up to the elementary school on Thursday morning to (belatedly) pick up Monkey's application forms. Apparently they've been taking applications since the beginning of April, but the website remained singularly information-free and it's taken me this long to make a phone call to ask about it. As we parked I was thinking about how this is a whole new chapter and a place that's totally new to us (albeit only up the road and around the corner from our house) - and then we promptly met two people we knew. So that augured well. The building is pretty new, and it felt airy and clean and welcoming, and the staff were friendly and helpful.

Among the basic information and the medical forms and whatnot was a get-to-know-your-child form with some fairly silly questions, like whether your child can recognise some upper and lowercase letters or whether they can put things in order. How do they expect parents to answer "Does your child have an advanced vocabulary?" For one thing, it's ridiculously subjective, and for another, who's really going to answer no to that? If it had said "...an advanced vocabulary in English" that would have made a little more sense, as many of the pupils might have a different first language. Anyway, I ticked boxes, got Monkey to perform a few hastily contrived tests with crayons and shapes, and ticked a few more. He recognised the numbers up to 8, but by August he could well be up to 999. And he counted to 49 without missing a beat, before resetting to an optimistic "... thirty?"

And this afternoon, we did this: