August 7: Small Pudding, Starving Kids, Cheese

Everybody had something to say about it, but nobody said or thought it was at all a small pudding for a large family.  It would have been flat heresy to do so.  Any Cratchit would have blushed to hint at such a thing.

This little passage is about the Cratchits' Christmas pudding.  The Cratchits live on the edge of starvation, eking out a meager existence on the tiny salary that Scrooge pays Bob.  Yet, nobody feels deprived.  Nobody complains.  They are overjoyed with the food on their table.

This morning, my son got me up much earlier than I wanted to get up again.  After about an hour of being awake, he asked for "round crackers" for breakfast.  Well, Ritz crackers aren't so horrible (not as bad as chocolate milk and Tootsie Rolls), but I wanted to give him something healthy to accompany the crackers.  So I prepared a bowl of Ritz and a couple slices of cheese.

When I handed him the bowl, my son acted as if I had just served him a helping of small pox mixed with fecal matter.  When I insisted he eat the cheese, my son obliged me, as demonstrated by the picture below:

Yes, this is my son spitting his cheese back into his bowl of crackers.  Unlike the Cratchit children, he has no problem criticizing the food that he is given to eat.  Where Tiny Tim and crew would have been ecstatic over Kraft American cheese, my son simply masticates and regurgitates.  I almost used the old saying my mom used on me when I was a kid:  "You know there are starving kids in Africa who would be overjoyed to have that cheese."  However, I refrained from stooping to such an old parental chestnut.  I'm pretty sure Socrates' mom said to him at one point, "You know, Socrates, there are starving kids in Mesopotamia who would be very happy with that wild boar meat."

However, I was too tired to fight this battle.  I will save the lesson of poverty and starvation for another time.  My son got his Ritz crackers, and I got back a bowl of chewed-up cheese and spit.

Maybe Saint Marty will take a page out of Joan Crawford's parenting guide and give his son the bowl of cheese slop for lunch.