Little Boy’s culinary tastes have certainly evolved. When he first came home (almost two whole years ago to the week!), he eschewed many foods that are now his favorites: pizza, waffles, pancakes, cake, donuts, hot dogs. (Of course, not the healthiest foods, and foods we resorted to offering him because he was only eating bananas and peanut butter in alarming portions).
Now, he clamors for these treat foods. We had hotdogs the other night and Little Boy was in ecstasy — finally, after five nights of chicken and fish, hotdogs! What he is beginning to realize is that we never buy the same kind of hotdog. Sometimes it’s sausage, sometimes turkey dogs, sometimes chicken dogs, sometimes bratwurst. He favors the traditional long skinny red ones, but even those vary greatly depending on which kinds are on sale at Whole Foods.
So after the hotdog dinner, he said to me, “The hotdogs taste different.” He looked rather worried.
“Yes, I think those are a different kind,” I told him.
“No,” he said. “No, they are the same kind.” The worry turned to sadness. “I think something’s wrong with my mouth!”
On Saturday Mr. P gave him a Dunkin Donut for breakfast before his YMCA sports sampler class, then a bag of gummy fruit snacks, then they went to the supermarket and Little Boy ate a piece of cake. All of this before noon (I was out running 20 miles, dreaming of cake).
This amount of sugar with no mitigating healthy food put the normally-relaxed Little Boy into a frenzy. Mr. P reports that, during the sport class, he was is rare form, matching the other sugared-up kids in energy and aggression. At home, he rejected lunch and instead roamed around the house with a blanket over his head like a cape, making strange and loud noises. When I took him to the bathroom, he was in such a crazed state that, after I finally got him to wash his hands, I told him “Go tell Daddy ‘You did this.'”
“What does that mean?” he asked, jumping up and down as his head swayed under the weight of his blanket cape.
“Just go say to Daddy, ‘Mommy said you did this.'”
And he raced into the bedroom to do exactly that.
Time to get out of the house. We went to the Blue Hills to totter cautiously on the Ponkapoag board walk. Of course, caution is not a word that a sugar-hyped 4 year old boy can abide by. He fell in the bog twice. Fun times.
Ponkapoag Board Walk
