Mealtime Fun

Meals have been very interesting at our house ever since Spencer came along. First there was the spew phase, where he launched pureed carrots around the dining room with the precision and frequency of an artillery commander at the Meuse-Argonne. This was followed by the gravity phase, epitomized by the consistent and successful effort to drop his drink, bowl, and utensils over the side of the high chair onto the floor. Not to mention green beans, corn, potatoes, and anything else that won't stick to his fingers. More recently these bombing runs have been accompanied by an exclamation of "uh-oh", with, shall we say, somewhat tepid conviction and sincerity. Throughout these there has also been the sharing phase, where he will cheerfully remove some half-chewed item from his mouth and offer it to you. (This one is actually very sincere, and the sentiment is nice. We just need to work on the particulars of the delivery so it occurs before anything is ingested.)

Over the past few months he has been more eager to feed himself, and this has also coincided with his more active use of sign language. He actually has a pretty good spoken vocabulary for his age, but he has been very excited to learn signs, particularly those pertaining to food and meals. He knows the signs for food, juice, milk, apple, cracker, and cookie (among others). He also has his own version of "finished", which he uses whenever we put something in front of him that he doesn't
like (or even something he does like, but apparently is not on his own internal menu for the day). Usually, "finished" will be followed immediately by "cookie" so that there is no doubt as to his expectations: "I'm not full; just take this away and give me a cookie." Thus we now have the demanding-diner phase. Another aspect of demanding-diner is his tendency to overload his mouth with food that he can't chew; lacking molars, he does a pretty good job, but occasionally he will literally bite off more than he can chew, and this results in an unhappy moment. He simply looks at me with sad eyes and moans, his cheeks loaded like a chipmunk's. It is then that I brave the incisors of death (they're really sharp) to fish out the offending, half-chewed piece of chicken or whatever that is the bottleneck. His mom is better at it than I am, but so far I've managed to avoid getting chewed/bitten along the way.

If all this makes any of you prospective parents lose your appetite, take heart; it seems that as a parent, one is able to build an immunity to this (among many other things) over time. Speaking of which, I'm off
to get lunch.

Golden What?

So I’m munching this golden delicious apple that was part of my balanced lunch (read: it offset, in microscopic terms, the LDL being piled on by the two slices of leftover Pizza Hut that I ate today).  I know it’s a golden delicious because of the friendly sticker.  And I’m wondering, who gets away with categorizing an entire fruit type as “delicious” anyway?  One bad apple (ha, ha!) could ruin the whole reputation.  I’m sure we’ve all had a golden delicious (or its friend the red delicious) that was somewhat less than delicious, strictly speaking.  But then, who would buy a “golden pretty good” apple anyway?  Accurate, true, but with all the charm of a planned economy.

It turns out that those folksy West Virginians have no scruples when it comes to imposing performance anxiety on thousands of apples every day.  Per our friends at Wikipedia (who also supply the lovely stock photo), the golden delicious spontaneously appeared as a volunteer tree in the middle of a West Virginia farm in the 1890s.  (You should read the whole account; all that’s missing is an aphorism at the end: “and that, boys and girls, is why you never pull up an apple sapling; you may be saving an entirely new cultivar.”)  Objectively delicious (is there such as thing?) or not, West Virginia immortalized the golden delicious in 1955 by making it the official state fruit.

And thus ends the lunchtime musing.  For the record: mine was delicious.