History is cruel

History sometimes is cruel. It repeats itself as some say.. and you think back and go "wait a minute. Wasn't I supposed to learn something from the past and build on it in the future?"

Well, the little one is now at the same stage as Jr. from a few years ago and we are now watching the breakfast saga as though is a slow motion rerun of a bad Law and Order episode!

The only good news is that Jr. outgrew the custom of "chewing the cud" and behaving like a Camel after two years. The little one amazed me by doing something two weeks ago. She looked at me around lunch time and said "Can I spit this out?" to which I said "fine!"

She spit out something in the wash basin that pretty much was hard and simply would not wash down to the drain. I had to literally smash that stuff and push it into the drain.

Further interrogation revealed that the two hard objects she spit out where the breakfast cereal she had stuffed into her cheeks that morning. After having stored it in her mouth for almost 4 hours she spit it out because she needs the space to store parts of her lunch.

This kid is getting very good at shortening our lifespan significantly. Her sister was a saint by comparison. So we are creating new history here!

.

Those arduous few minutes

It is a daily ritual now.

We wake up early in the morning, brush our teeth and start praying to the god of Cheerios!

Swallow, chomp, bite, chew, fast, quickly, we are late, let's call her teacher on the phone, you are going to the street, please, vaayila kozhakaataiya irukku (do you have dumplings in your mouth), etc. etc. in every permutation and combination you can think of!

All to get a 100 or so honey nut cheerios into that little mouth and make sure they continue their one way trip to Jr.'s stomach. Sometimes, they get a free return ticket when Jr. feels double or triple or quadruple teamed (these days even the little one chimes in with "eat", "eat"!)

We are now switching to honey bunches of oats, idly's, dosai's.. etc.. But at the end of the day, the pushing food into the mouth routine continues..

A picture is worth a 1000 words. This one is worth about 73 cheerios!

Do you see the pain in her face? All that suffering! Oh, the humanity! We should be insane to put food into a little girl! What are we thinking?

After a 40-50 minute session of cheerios pushing, we all smile and she races to school with either Mommy or Daddy.

Maybe I should liquify the Cheerios and make her drink it with milk?

Maybe I should invent a system that lets her stomach absorb food through her skin. I could tie a cheerios pack around her stomach as soon as she wakes up, and it would slowly infuse the cheerios into her stomach by lunch break!

These days they are coming up with medicine patches that send medicine through the skin. So why not breakfast? I am hereby laying claim to the food patch for difficult kids!

If anyone actually succeeds at this, please send me a check.. or at least a few free samples!

.