Strawberries and tuna

Sometimes, it would have been nice to have the second child first.

Mostly I'm very glad ours turned out this way round, but now and then Mabel does something to make me realise how very pointless it was worrying about something with Monkey.

I'm talking about food, mostly. Oh, the countless minutes - tens of them at a time, even - that I spent agonising over how I must be doing something wrong with the way I was offering Monkey food. It must be too late, too early, too near nap time, too soon after nursing, the wrong sort of food - clearly it was my fault that he wasn't eating anything.

At lunchtime today Mabel cleared my misconceptions up for me once and for all. We had spent the morning in doing nothing, as she had sprouted a cold yesterday evening, incubated it all night while not sleeping, and by now was producing a constant gentle drip of clear snot. I thought we should take it easy, though she didn't seem to see the need. Anyway, around 11.30 I was thinking of starting lunch and she wanted to nurse, so rather than push food on her when she probably had no appetite, I went ahead and nursed her. Then she saw a tiny tub of strawberry ice-cream as I opened the freezer, and demanded some. I said "Okay, if you have some strawberries with it" - reasoning that she might get some vitamin C that way - and put a tiny scoop in a bowl with a quartered giant strawberry. She polished off the ice-cream and ignored the fruit.

Then I sat down with my tuna melt (fancy name for a tuna-and-cheese toasted sandwich, dontcha know), and at the last minute cut off a largish portion for Mabel's plate - if she didn't want it, as I assumed would be the case, I could always take it back.

She ate it. And asked for more.

So there you are. She was too tired, she'd just nursed, she'd eaten dessert already, it was a new food, and she ate it anyway. Because that's what most kids do. Monkey's just odd, and if I'd stopped blaming myself for his vagaries sooner, I'd have been just that little bit happier.

Oh well. Such is parenthood.