Here's a secret, or maybe a not-so-secret since I say it all the time: if [delicious item] is around, I am liable to eat it. You can put whatever tasty treat you want in those brackets and it probably still holds true, so my solution is basically to not keep snacks or treats around and trust that laziness usually wins out over snackiness. (Usually.) Speaking of, please remind me to delete the Skip the Dishes app from my phone when I'm done writing this.
That same friend calls it Skip the Bitches, by the way. She really is a master of the apt observation. Maybe I'll keep it around after all - there is simply no way to predict when you might need to defuse a bitchy day with a food delivery. *checks period tracker app* Like maybe Thursday this week, for instance. Who can guess.
Small Fry opened the pantry the other day then promptly slammed it shut again, with an exasperated, "Oh my gawd, our snack cupboard sucks!" Despite never having lived in a house with this feature and having been told roughly every single day of his life to eat a piece of fruit if he's hungry, he has somehow come to believe that a snack cupboard is a thing that we have - it's just that the one we have really sucks. (Unless you're super into dried beans, in which case you are well and truly covered for snacks at my house.) I corrected his misconception and pointed him yet again toward the fruit bowl, much to his disapproval.
Small Fry leads a charmed life. So charmed, in fact, that our shitty/nonexistent snack cupboard may well be The Thing. You know what I mean: THE Thing. The Thing that he has to go to therapy for and pins everything wrong in his life upon. The Thing his parents did to him that made it so he, I dunno, can never trust people fully and fears commitment. Or, y'know, whatever, just a totally random example there.
Every parent worries about The Thing, right? By this age he's surely already experienced The First Memory so that ship has sailed for me, fingers crossed it was a good one, or at the very least fairly benign, or at the very very least not one of the three to five potentially traumatic moments I have in mind. But I might still be able to control The Thing. I just really don't know when The Thing is solidified for a kid, so I've been walking on eggshells here for years. Will it be that all we ever had for snacks was g-d fruit in a fricking bowl and not even a cupboard like civilised folk? The cruel Halloween tax I charge every year, payable in tiny, hard-won KitKats? That I am The Boss of Christmas so the tree gets decorated the way I want? That time I found the stick person porn he had drawn?
... Ooooohhhh.
Yeah.
That was probably The Thing.
Okay, never mind. Seems unlikely I'll be able to do anything that outshines that little vignette in his mind. Parenting spiral over, carry on.
And if you're hungry, I have zero guilt about saying this: just eat an orange, dammit.
