Afternoon Snack from Honshu

Being a typical American three-year-old boy, Daniel loves to eat dried seaweed. Standard issue Japanese dried-out sheets of Nori. He makes a point of asking for it, and loves to munch on it in his car-seat in the mini-van.

Today he was eating it as a snack. He handed me the whole package and asked me to give him two sheets of it. I told him he should have one at a time, and he did, but of course as soon as he finished the first one, he was right back for the second.

The funniest thing is the way he eats it, crumpling it up in his hands, as it mades a huge crinkling sound, and then stuffing it into his mouth whole. It reminds me of Godzilla eating a billbaord, or some similarly Lilputian scene of wreckage and feeding frenzy.

After his two sheets, he gallantly resolved to leave the rest for Madeleine (who is 17 months old) because "she has plenty of teeth."

But there's no reason to worry that he might be losing his three-year-old sensibilities: as soon as his Japanese snack was finished, he picked up an open five-pound sack of sugar from the kitchen (mostly full), brought it into the dining room, and asked, "Daddy, can I have some of this?

I said no. At that point, gallantry went out the window. He brought the packet of "Emerald Cove Organic Pacific Nori" back to me and asked, "Can I have the whole thing of this - otherwise, I'll eat sugar, Daddy."

Priorities are expensive.

(September 25, 2009)