he's no dummy

For whatever weird reason, when Liam was born we could hardly wait to introduce him to dessert. You know, cookies, cake, candies, and the dreaded afternoon "snacks." What were we thinking?

So, when Elliott came along, I vowed to approach eating habits differently. In fact, Elliott's one-year-old birthday cake was about the first real taste of sugar the boy had ever had. No cookies, no Halloween candy, no need. Lately, though, we've been softening up. For one thing, Elliott has started paying attention to the things that Liam eats and he wants them, too.

A couple weeks ago, I gave Elliott one of our homemade oatmeal chocolate bar cookies and told him with reverence that he was eating a "cookie." He held the sweet disc up and screamed and then wolfed it down. The next night at dinner, Elliott promptly tossed everything off his plate onto the floor, looked at Andrew and demanded, "Cookie!" I'm thinking it was the combination of cookie and candy bar that did us in.

This morning, as I was talking on the phone, Elliott crawled into the family room and closed the door. He loves closing doors and although I usually reopen them fairly quickly to be sure he's not getting into trouble on the other side, today I let him enjoy his privacy for a minute. Not a particularly great idea. When I peeked in on him two minutes later he was sitting on the floor with the small heart-shaped box of chocolates we had given daddy for Valentine's day, stuffing the very last piece into his mouth. Making up for a lifetime of sugar-free living, he had eaten the entire box. I decided it was probably better not to tell him he had just enjoyed "candy." I'm already fearing we may never hear the end of it.