Back in January, our family wandered down to the National Zoo to pay our final visit to Tai Shan, the now four-year-old panda that went back to China earlier this month.

On our way back to the Columbia Heights Metro station, we took a bit of a detour and headed into the Adams-Morgan area in hopes of finding a relatively cheap supper.

What we found was an open-air food court, jammed full of excellent food. Most of the folks manning the stands were from South America rather than Central America (which goes a bit against the demographic trend of the area), but the fare was easily recognizable--grilled chicken, pupusas, tamales, etc.

Our older son Max isn't the most adventurous eater, but he is curious. He wanted us to pick something out for him. We told him he should ask the various vendors about their wares. In Spanish.

So he did. And while I had to translate a couple of the responses (Max's Spanish vocabulary is more scientific than food-related), everyone understood Max perfectly well. He sampled, ordered and paid for his food all on his own.

Max will be eight this week. We're getting more and more opportunities like the one in Adams-Morgan, where we begin to get an idea of how he'll navigate the world once he's on his own. In fact, we might be getting to the peak of such occasions, as he is more and more heading off on his own without his parents in tow. I can hope that's not true, but in any case, I'm enjoying what I'm seeing.

Max was an unusual baby. We got very few "oh, he's so cute!" comments. This is largely because Max was a monster baby. He was nine-and-a-half pounds at birth, and by six months he toppled the scales at a whopping 24 pounds. He had no neck. And he stared at people or things for an hour or more at a time.

Babies don't blink. But almost all of them have the attention span of a gnat. Not Max. If he decided you were interesting, he'd stare at you. For the length of a visit, sometimes. More than one friend called him "intense," and one woman described him as "freaky." Personally, I liked that. Barb was less pleased (If you wish to curry the favor of a new mom, don't call her baby "freaky").

Now that he's eight, Max carries slightly more than twice his six-month weight. He's pretty much all legs and arms. He never has to be told to go outside and play. And now that he's in the second grade, he's been able to do that with his friends without direct adult supervision. Ah, ain't life great?

The best thing about kids is when they surprise you--for better or worse. Max and his brother surprise me every day with some insight, observation or ability. Like our trip back from the zoo. Max goes to a Spanish-immersion elementary school, and half of his day (the math and science part) is Spanish-only. I know he can speak Spanish. But I'd never seen him actually use it. And to see him walk up to someone and speak confidently the way he did...it was great.

The schools here like to have students do "projects." I'm all in favor of this. He's had at least half an hour of homework every day since Kindergarten, and I think that's dumb. But the projects are cool. Max had to make a mobile. So he went down to the National Gallery of Art and saw some of Alexander Calder's works (There are times that living inside the Beltway can be pretty cool). So after some false starts, he created a massive mobile that featured various animals bent out of wire hangers. When I say massive, it fills our dining room. I don't know how we're going to get it to school. But it is cool.

Max got his picture in the Washington Post KidsPost page--they do this once a week for the birthdays of kids aged six to twelve. He missed out on the picture last year (Mom and Dad were a bit tardy getting it in), but now he's a full-fledged Washingtonian. Or suburban Washingtonian, anyway.

Oh, well. Nobody's perfect. Happy birthday, Max!

Jon Worley's Valentine's Day gift to his wife was not writing about their twenty years together.