Traffic violation on a bicycle...

Well, there is a first for everything. I got a ticket the other day for riding my bicycle the wrong way on a one-way street. I honestly had not seen the sign. And it would have been okay, if i hadn't met a cop's car on the way down the street. He braked and pointed to the sign. So i made an apologetic face and said "sorry." I thought that was the end of it. But then a street or so later the cop caught up with me again and yelled at me. "Why did you think i was pointing to the one-way sign? So you could ignore me?"
"no," i said, "i thought you pointed to it so that i would know for the next time."
Anyway, he was not amused. And then i didn't have ID on me which was another violation, but at least he didn't give me a ticket for that. I don't know yet how much this is going to cost me. I will get it in the mail.

The boys are making great progress. Stoney has finally learned to swing by himself (i thought i was going to have to push him fro the rest of his life) and he also learned to ride a bike without training wheels. Monty has finally gotten the hang of peddeling on the tricycle.
Stoney's Dutch is pretty good. Monty speaks a mixture of Dutchlish. "Ikke want the auto" and "Monty heeft 'wonnen." Ther are a couple of sentences that he's got down pretty well: "dat mag niet" (that is not allowed) and "Foei, foei, foei" (naughty, naughty, naughty) I suppose he hears those at school a lot =)

The temperature has dropped drastically here. It has been freezing overnight and it only warms up slightly above freezing during the day. It's not normal to be this cold this early in the season, it's just a cold spell. But meanwhile, we are bundeling up and even with that, the boys are shivering in the bakfiets in the morning.

trashbags: 2 euro a piece

Trash management is interesting here. Recycling and trash separation is mandatory. There are different colored trash bags for different kinds of trash. And you have to buy the special trash bags from your city. If you use a different kind of trash bag the waste truck just won't take it. The white trash bag that collects everything that doesn't go into any other the other bags costs 2 euros a piece!!! (in case you wonder it is about $2.50) They make it so high to encourage you to recycle i guess. The blue trash bag is a lot cheaper, it takes empty plastic bottles, empty cans etc. Last week i saw a whole bunch of blue trash bags by a house that the waste truck had left behind. They had big red stickers on them: REJECTED. The blue trash bags are a little see through and i guess the waste collectors just leave it behind if they see something in there that doesn't belong there.
Such are our trash adventures in Belgium

On an entire different note, Monty is being a royal pain in the butt lately. (i guess the topic is related, cause i wonder sometimes if i should put him in the trash...) He is going all out to make everyone's life miserable. Whenever we say yes, he'll say no, regardless of what it is about. He has been hitting Stoney and then completely unimpressed when you scold him about it. He did well with being potty trained for a while, but last week -and this- he has been having accidents on a daily basis. (and again seems completely unimpressed when you get angry about it). And then there is the sleeping issue. This sommer, oh happy day, for a while he would go to bed at seven and not wake up till 6 am. Six is still earlier then i would like, but hey, it is improvement. But since we are in Belgium he is back to what he did a year ago: waking up every four hours. That means, waking up between eleven and midnight and then sometime between 3 and 4 am. And it would be more tolerable if he would just go back to sleep within ten minutes, but he doesn't. He prefers to have temper tantrums at these ungodly hours. Every night there is something. Sometimes he'll have a fit because he wants to get in bed with us, and he is not allowed. Sometimes he'll have a fit because Leland gets up with him, instead of Anne. Or he'll have a fit because he wants you to come lay in bed with him, or because he wants his milk cup filled and you are not doing it quickly enough, or because he has decided it is morning time and wants to get up....
It is very, very tiring. We are praying every night that he'll please, please, sleep through the night, but so far, no dice. The only silver lining in all this is that at least Stoney is a pretty deep sleeper and usually won't wake-up when Monty goes at it.
We are very grateful he is going to school full-day, because we're not sure we'd survive having him home all day long. He loves school too, so that is good. I often wonder what happened to my sweet little boy. I guess the only explanation is that he is 3...