Cereal, Poptarts, and Ketchup

My two year old would live on these three things if he could--cereal, Poptarts, and ketchup. In fact, solely because of his love for Poptarts, I had to put a child lock on the cabinet that held the poptarts, because he would go over there and help himself, and get mad when I refused them to him. He usually gets a Poptart about five times a week, for breakfast or an afternoon snack, and I'm okay with that.

The cereal is on top of the fridge, and there it has to stay, because there's really no other room for it. So, as he sits at the table supposedly eating a real meal, he looks up there and says, "Cereal. Cereal. Cereal." This sometimes causes fit throwing and crying (him, not me. Well, sometimes both of us). Actually, the cereal isn't so bad. I once read this magazine article where a nutritionist analyzed the food selections of a few women and tested them to see how they matched up against the RDA. One woman did very well, simply because she ate a bowl of cereal each day. The cereals, even the sugary ones, are all very fortified with vitamins. The biggest problem with this is that Kyle's favorite cereal is Lucky Charms. If he ate the sugary oat pieces, it would be marginal, but he only eats the artificially colored sugary marshmallows. This cereal I do try to hide so as not to torment him. And if you're wondering why I don't just stop buying it. . . . it's my husband's.

This brings us to the ketchup. He eats it with a spoon. If I don't give him a spoon, he puts all of his fingers together and uses them to scoop it up. I'm not feeling so bad about the ketchup, either, because I think that President George Bush (the first) did declare it a vegetable. Tomato paste is the number one ingredient. And it has lycopene. Everyone knows how good lycopene is.

He's only two. He likes these things. He things that more of a good thing is a great thing! I think that most of us have learned that this theory is not true in general for our lives. For me, I've gotten my creative juices flowing, with this blog and some other writing I've been doing. That's a good thing. But is more of that good thing a great thing? I've had a hard time getting to sleep the last couple of weeks. The creative juices are flowing and flowing and flowing keeping my mind active when my body wants to rest. Now I'm trying to figure out how I can get them to stop! I jot in my journal to remove the thoughts from my head so I can stop thinking, and sometimes they go away and sometimes they keep tormenting me like the Lucky Charms on the top of the refrigerator. The good news is that these thoughts are usually the fortified oat pieces, not just the artificially colored sugary marshmallows. So I'm going to continue to allow myself this treat.