For years, my son would only eat one or two foods. Those foods would change over the years: where once he would only eat chicken fingers, he switched over to pasta with red sauce and never wanted chicken fingers ever again. He basically loved beige foods: chicken nuggets/fingers, french fries, dinner rolls, apple sauce, bananas, green grapes, dry Cheerios, toaster waffles, pancakes. All beige/yellow. All carbs (excepts, I guess, for the chicken, but really, processed chicken is probably more a carb than a protein.)

The boy was breast-fed (for 11 months), made the transition to solid foods at the normal time. He’d eat anything. Green goo, orange goo…it was all good. He loved his rice cereal mixed with apple sauce. To the point where he had it for breakfast every day for about 4-5 years, until he made the switch to toaster waffles, where he stayed until they discontinued his favorite brand a few years ago.

When he was being fussy, we worried and took him to the doctor. He was off the charts for height and weight (but in proportion) for his age, ate a ton of fruit, and only had red sauce (tomatoes) on his pasta, so the doctor declared he was actually a pretty healthy eater, all things considered. So he told us not to stress about it, because making food a source of stress is never a healthy thing to do. So we didn’t.

My son didn’t like hamburgers or meatballs until he was about 10. Then he loved them. He suddenly started loving salad with Italian dressing. No creamy dressings. Nothing creamy. In general, he rejected all dairy as something he didn’t like. We later learned he’s lactose intolerant, but seriously, when we went out for ice cream he would pick sorbet because that’s what he wanted.

I remember going to Disney with him when he was four, and planning every meal around whether or not the restaurant could serve pasta marinara. Any restaurant that has ANY kind of pasta dish can usually pull it off. Disney is the greatest place to take people with food allergies, etc., because they go so far above and beyond to make sure there’s something for you to eat. I will ALWAYS remember we went to the buffet at Crystal Palace and they only had mac and cheese on the buffet. Our server went down Main Street to Tony’s Town Hall restaurant to fetch my son a plate of pasta with sauce. (My friends, THIS is why Disney rocks my world.)

We had heard people say their kids outgrew being fussy eaters, but when you live with one for 10+ years, you start to think maybe they just meants small changes; and quite frankly, those were welcome. He added steak to his list of okay foods, which opened up a LOT of restaurants. Hell, even adding burgers did that.

But then something happened last spring. He was 12, and we were again at Disney, traveling with my sister’s family. My sister’s kids were always bottomless pits for trying new things. My BIL had a hard time understanding why we couldn’t just force my son to eat new things. He never lived with a fussy child so I suppose I shouldn’t have expected him to understand.  Prior to the trip my son and I talked about the restaurants we’d be visiting, and my son declared he’d use this trip to “try new things”. I thought that was a great idea.

What happened during that trip was that I had to start a log of all the new foods he’d tried, because nobody could believe it. Sushi (he loved), scallops (he loved), bison (he loved), etc. etc.  There was NOTHING he wouldn’t try. We were all floored. And then it continued. He went on a trip with his father and tried pot roast and lamp chops – loved both. He continued the trend by ordering things even I thought he wouldn’t like. Trout at Longhorn Steakhouse. On another trip this past January, he ended up trying 4 different kinds of new fish (flounder, mahi-mahi, smoked salmon). He’s since ordered mahi-mahi at the local Mexican place. He orders these dishes and cleans his plate. Last Saturday we went to a Tapas place in Waltham and he tried everything – including a cold crab and mango salad, a shrimp and lobster ravioli, ceviche, duck, an onion and potato omelette and goat cheese. He loved almost everything he tried. He’s starting to freak me out! He orders his burgers (previously plain only, not even ketchup on them) with onions, pickles and mustard! He’s also become quite the expensive date compared to the days of chicken fingers and ziti with marinara sauce. But my God, the options for restaurants!

I’m not saying this will happen to every fussy eater; my son may have be a statistical aberration. But his father is now officially fussier than he is, and food is no longer the biggest issue in our house. It’s really a different world now.

I like to take pictures of him, I think because it is tied to my fear of loss and my hatred of growing older and my tendency to hoard things, including memories. Every snapshot captures a moment, and when I look at it later, I remember the circumstances under which I took the photo. Someone was angry and only pretended to smile for the camera and then later we had ice cream and that fixed everything. Or the last time we all went on an outing somewhere before the place closed and was torn down.

I may or may not have an irrational fear of losing things. Places, people, products. They discontinued my soap recently. It’s just one in a long line of products that have been taken away; my favorite flavor of Kool-Aid, my favorite jarred spaghetti sauce. A true hoarder would have had a case of the soap the hallway, so the loss might not be felt for a year or more. Me, I had one bar left when I found out. I’ll find something else that I like – maybe not as much, but it’s just soap. I will adjust to the loss of my soap.

I have two specific photos I’ve taken in my life that I would call morbid. One of was of my grandfather, in his casket. It didn’t occur to me that people didn’t take photos at funerals, but I was just a little kid, I owned a camera, and my parents said it was okay. All the flowers were so pretty; why wouldn’t you take a picture? But looking back, it is an odd photo. I remember taking it. I remember my grandmother looking at me, and me thinking she was checking to see if I was crying. My cousin was crying. I felt guilty because I wasn’t. All that comes back to me when I even think about that snapshot. The other morbid photo was one I took of my son when he was 15 months old. We were taking him in for surgery that morning, to get ear tubes to prevent the constant infections he’d had since he was born. Horribly common surgery for babies, but you have to sign all those papers that say you understand the risk, and any parent who doesn’t break out in a cold sweat signing those may need some kind of intervention. I took the photo the morning we were going in for the surgery. I couldn’t not take one. He was happy, in his red PJs and had bed-head. That’s how I would want to remember him; that this was how he looked, right up until the moment of whatever fate had in store for him (and us.)

Luckily, the surgery went fine, changed our lives for the better, and he just turned 13 last week. I still take his picture all the time. Some part of me just wants to capture all the memories so that I won’t forget, won’t ever forget. Places and people and products get taken away from me all the time, and I guess the only way I can fight back is to take pictures and store them on hard drives, DVDs, shoe boxes and in photo albums. I hoard memories, and if I take a picture of you, don’t get annoyed with me; I’m trying to hold on to you tightly the only way I know how.

[The conversation begins with one of them asking why people say Mazel Tov, which segued into asking what Cinco de Mayo means. Which segued into a question about the Day of the Dead, which featured a comment that Dora the Explorer had a show about going to Mexico for the  Day of the Dead. Or something.]

Boy: Dora lives somewhere in South America.

Me: I don’t think so. Pretty sure she’s American.

Boy: She hangs out with a Monkey, so she must live near a jungle.

Me: She doesn’t live in South America.

Boy: She’s from Mexico, originally, but she came over the border and her fox followed her.

Me: It’s not “her” fox. And no. He doesn’t even have an accent. What about the monkey?

Boy: She took it with her.

Me: You can’t just bring a Monkey into this country like that. It’s against the law. You can’t just go through a border check with a monkey and not get stopped.

Boy: She did. Where else would she get a monkey?

Me: ….

Boy: I still don’t think she lives in America.

Me: I’m just concerned that Boots will eventually chew her face off. I don’t think monkeys make good pets.

Everyone has two junk drawers, right?

Anyway, Happy Birthday, to my lovely sister, who is younger than me but I will deny it until we are old and decrepit. Which may be soon.

old-fashioned toys, originally uploaded by Big DumpTruck.

He was also very taken with the Jacob’s Ladder toy. Seriously, we were amused by how much he loved these hundred + year-old toys. I could trade in a bunch of his video games and buy some little wooden toys. I’ll bet that would go over really well.

Actually, this is a kid whose most valuable possession is a beat-to-hell blue plastic bat. So wooden toys might be good.

Please note the blinding sunlight in this photo (actually screwed up most of my photos so I have to add fill light in post-processing). After we grabbed a traditional Irish Pub [late] lunch at Molly Malone’s (Mr. Dump had bangers and mash, nuff said.) we headed home – into the worst thunderstorm so far this summer. And that’s saying something. I’m waiting for the power to go off.

Happy Father’s Day everyone! Enjoy all the dad-activities you have planned, even if the plan is to not have any activities.

I get to wear the “Dying in the Heat Watching Little League Games badge.”

Junior played on Sunday (he had to be at the field at 1:30pm for a batting practice before the game) and on Monday night. Even though it started later, so you’d maybe assume it would be cooler, Monday was definitely the worst of the two games, because at least on Sunday there was a breeze. Man, what a difference a breeze makes! I was seriously starting to feel a bit panicky last night about how overheated I was getting. I was pulling the ice packs out of the little cooler I had and was applying it to my neck and wrists, just to keep things cool.

So I grant myself a mom badge today (it’s lovely, it’s got bleachers with those wavy heat lines coming off of them with a background picture of a baseball.) Anyone else earn one the past few days?

Speaking of Junior, yesterday he told me that at school he read my blog about the pudding skin. Do you know what this means? DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS? I’ve been writing this darned thing for so long that my kid is now a reader? Holy cow, that freaked me out. Now I have to make sure I remember that my 10 year old might decide to pull up my site at school and share with his teacher and friends (*waves to his teacher and friends*)

Now I’ll get in trouble if I talk about him. Well, I’ve always tried to be nice, I’ll just have to be nicer now.

As if that’s even possible.

Yours truly,
Miss Mary Sunshine

This may not translate as well as I’d like, because it was part of a larger conversation, and you have to know about the kinds of snacks that parents buy for their kids these days. If you are unfamiliar with the concept of Fruit Roll-ups or Froot-by-the-Foot this is going to whoosh past you, granny.

I admitted publicly that I like pudding skin. Mr. Dump started to propose a method of exposing as many sides of the pudding as possible so that you could get a LOT of pudding skin out of one cup of pudding. And then Junior suggested Pudding Skin by the Foot. Well, that did it for me. The concept of a long strip of pudding skin that you unfold to eat brought me to tears.

But looking back, I don’t think I’d buy it. Because part of the beauty of the whole fruit roll-up product is that it doesn’t require refrigeration. If you leave pudding skin out, you’ll really have pudding jerky, and I don’t know if I’m ready for that.