Zoomer-Smasher-Dune buggy when I ride my bike?

-Mark, age 4

This is the week that Mark learned to ride a two wheeled bike and picked up a book and read it. Blast. Next thing I know he will be telling me that he is engaged.

Richard bought Mark a bike without pedals because it’s the latest thing in balance theory. (I just made that up.) We’re believers in the balance theory, though. Without training wheels, Mark learned to balance on two wheels in about a day. We live on a hill and he walks himself up and then he glides down the hill. His wrecks are spectacular. I can hardly watch.

Sigh. My little Mark is now “Zoomer-Smasher-Dune buggy.”

And if that was not enough, on the same day he decided to read.

I committed a social faux pas last week when I told two friends who are avid preschool mothers that I haven’t been “pushing” reading for Mark. It seems like everyone wants their preschool children to read. I have known for a while that Mark was ready to read but I hadn’t prepared the little books and incentive program that my other children needed/loved when they were learning. I was waiting for a little prep time before we really got started.

Paige’s incentives were stickers and pizza; Daniel and Timothy ate candy and earned pieces of a pirate ship as they learned their phonics lessons. I was hoping Mark’s incentives would involve sharing chocolates and lots of hugs and kisses.

Somehow without the incentives and the structure he learned anyway. Perhaps his was the most powerful incentive of all: he wants to be a reader like everyone else in the house. I’m not saying he’s reading everything, but yesterday his little readers arrived in the mail and he picked one up and read several pages aloud, commenting that the word “and” was sure used a lot.

So there he goes… our baby(whimper)… off into the big world of high speed and higher education.