Yesterday was The Max’s first Little Kicker’s football class. He’s been excited about this all week. He had such a good time in class that he literally started bawling when it was over and it was time to leave. He didn’t want to have to go. And today, he’s ready to go again, but class isn’t until next Thursday.

The boy loves his sports.

It was a joy to watch him in class; running, laughing…so excited that he had to run and jump the whole time rather than walk. It makes me wonder whether it would be better to get a part time nanny for him (more or less like we did before) or put him in a morning nursery school so he could interact more with other kids. We’ll hopefully be meeting more kids around the neighborhood, but it’s not like our old neighborhood in Prairie Crossing where there were kids everywhere and they could just steal him away for hours on end.

The one thing that The Max most decidedly does NOT love about London, however, are the cheese shops. I think even if you combined a football and cheese shop, he’d still hate it. We’ve gone into a few cheese shops (since Daddy and I DO love cheese) and as soon as we go in, The Max takes a sniff and says This place is oogy. We need to go now! Let’s get out of here! It’s bad!

I have no idea how we’re going to buy cheese unless we take turns and one of us waits outside the shop with The Max. They are rather pungent, in a blue-cheesey sort of way. An acquired taste, I suppose.

At any rate, we also went out to dinner last night at La Sophia, a local French Mediterranean restaurant on Golborne Road. It was a really pleasant surprise and we’ll definitely be back. Daytime Golborne is much more bustling than nighttime Golborne and I’d been telling Tony he had to check out the street…then we were walking down it last night and not much was open. Oops, sorry, honey.

I was beginning to wonder if we were going to have to try an entirely different street when we came across three restaurants in a row. All of them looked completely empty, which is generally not a good sign. One was Palestinian, one was La Sophia, and the other was Indian. Tony had curry for lunch, so that scratched the Indian place. We decided to go for the French one. We were the only people there for a while, but once it got around 8 PM, the tables suddenly began to fill up. Perhaps it’s just that we’re early eaters? After all, we’ve got to get The Max to bed at a reasonable hour.

Of course, we may be the only people that actually takes their toddler out to eat in London. Though at La Sophia, kids actually eat free, which was a pleasant surprise (The Max, for the record, had plain butter penne noodles and triple cooked chips).

The food was quite good and the ambiance was, to use a British term, brilliant. Very lovely, good lighting, all around a pleasant atmosphere. Smallish dining room up top, but Tony said there was more dining room down below. A lot of places here are like that. You can’t tell by the size of the ground floor dining how big a place *really* is.

I warned you, but you didn't listen.

I ordered the rabbit, which earned me the standard talk I get from every waiter when I order rabbit: Are you sure? Have you had rabbit before? I must not look like the type of person who would gobble up a fluffy little bunny. It happens every time and I almost always order the rabbit if I see it on a menu. This one was really yum (and de-boned, making it easier to eat than normal rabbit dishes tend to be). The only rabbit I’ve had better was in Italy outside of Florence.

For those of you who can’t imagine eating up a fluffy little bunny…I will tell you this — if you didn’t already know it from Monty Python and The Holy Grail, rabbits are really quite evil. Really. Don’t feel guilty. My parents briefly had a rabbit farm in Arkansas when I was little (no, I am not making this up…though I rather wish I were). Bunnies eat their own young. A lot of them have really nasty temperaments.

And they’re yummy.

Sorry to all you vegetarians out there.