Saucy

We often feed William food after secretly slipping in additional ingredients like spices, butter, sauces, and so on. He enjoys them without realizing we have improved what he is eating. He thinks he eats plain rice and toast, but they usually have butter added (in an effort to fatten him up a little). He prefers plain pasta to tomato sauces, though he LOVES pesto and alfredo. But sometimes we still toss his pasta in a light tomato sauce.

Recently at dinner, Will ate all of his plain pasta and wanted more, but he had eaten everything we had cooked. We suggested he could eat the other items on his plate, but we were not making more pasta just for him. He continued to insist that he needed more pasta.

We then brought out some leftovers from what he had eaten just two days before. It was pasta lightly tossed in a garlic tomato sauce. He noticed the sauce and refused to eat it proclaiming, “I only like plain pasta, not mixed with tomato sauce.”

“Will, you just ate this the day before yesterday and loved it!” we exclaimed.

“I didn’t eat this! I want plain pasta,” he insisted. Though, we can assure you, it is exactly what he had eaten two days previous and more than one helping to boot. We tried to convince him that he had indeed eaten that exact pasta with the sauce, with hopes that he would just accept the fact eat it.

Frustrated, Will promptly stood up and walked away from the dining table. He returned with a piece of plain paper and a pencil and began writing. “What are you writing, Will?” we asked. He just kept writing without uttering a single word.

Once completing his composition, he folded the paper in half, wrote his name on the front, sat down, and ate the rest of his dinner without touching the tomato contaminated pasta. When we asked what he had written he mumbled with a full mouth, “it is a reminder for me. It is going on my bedroom door.” After asking a few times, he finally let us read the note:

Remember to never eat pasta again 
until Mom makes you plain pasta with salt!

A Child’s Prayer

Lucky is such a cute black cocker spaniel. His face draws you in, with those deep brown eyes. Lucky does not just wag his tail, but he wags the entire lower half of his body. He wags so fast and crazily he can hardly walk at times and it is a wonder he can stand on his hind legs.

As much as we love Lucky, he can be frustrating. His desire to remove the stuffing out of everything seems to be an addiction. His toys and dog beds have all fallen victim to this insatiable need of his. Lori walked out of the family room the other day to see balls of fluff all over the hallway floor surrounding a now deflated dog bed. At her wits end, she declared in a tense voice, “Lucky, you need to stop destroying your beds!”

Will dashed into the hallway, quickly offering words of wisdom, “Mom, I know what you can do. You can pray for Lucky to not do it and then you won’t be so frustrated.”

“Is that what you do, Will?” Lori inquired.

“I pray when I am worried or scared about something and it works for me.” Will continued to explain, “Like the other night I was afraid that there would be a flood here. So I prayed. And there wasn’t one!”