Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Just Give Us Ugly Candy From Now On

A few months ago, Pumpkin was given a large, chocolate Easter dog, which she tasted, but then deemed too cute to eat. She wanted to keep it instead. Grrrreeaaat. More crap in my house. Given that I fully intended to throw out the chocolate dog at the first opportunity, I implemented my usual system: Hide it for a fixed amount of time, then toss it when I am certain that it has been forgotten about. This is how I rid my life of Happy Meal toys and mounds of Pumpkin's art work, so I did the same with the chocolate dog.

I hid the chocolate dog well enough that I completely forgot about it myself. However, recently a visiting friend of mine was desperate for a junk food fix and stumbled across the chocolate dog, which I gave her permission to eat. She smashed it up, and satisfied her craving, storing the leftovers in a container in one of my kitchen cupboards.

Today while Pumpkin was instructing my mom on where to find a good snack, Pumpkin chose the cupboard where the smashed dog was hiding. It isn't a usual snack cupboard for Pumpkin, but I think she is now on to the fact that the huz and I have our own guilty pleasures tucked away in various compartments in the kitchen, and she wanted to check around.

Needless to say, Pumpkin was mortified with what she found. The waterworks turned on full force as she bawled, shouting at me for letting this happen to her dog. She was inconsolable.

I would have felt absolutely terrible about all this if it weren't for one fact. Between tearful episodes of Pumpkin mourning the death of her beloved chocolate dog, who was so cute, and is now gone forever, she was stuffing her face with its remnants!

I wonder if animals who eat their young ever get this emotional?

7 comments:

lacochran's evil twin said...

Isn't it amazing how attached we get to things at that age. It is the most important thing IN THE WORLD... for 30 seconds.

Barrie said...

Once, I kept an Easter bunny on my window sill. When I went back to eat it a couple of months later, it was .... a hardened puddle of chocolate. ;)

petite gourmand said...

mmmm...chocolate doggie bits.....

Ms. Diva said...

Life lessons can be so difficult!!!! At least she had chocolate for comfort!!! Heehee

1001petals said...

Ok, that was really funny.

Anonymous said...

Even in a protected environment, surrounded by loving parents and friends, trauma happens. It brings unhappiness and it's remembered for a long time.

The trauma seems to come from our reaction to outside events. But our trauma is already there in seed form as an underlying weakness in our nervous system, ready to find reasons to stress out.

I'm not so sure we should accept this as the normal human state.

Why is a child weak? Why is a child so ready to stress out?

I'm not offering answers in this comment, just raising some questions.

David Spector
www.nsrusa.org

Anonymous said...

Re: previous comment... You really want to know why a child is weak and ready to stress out? They don't have the benefit of experience to put things in perspective. Every experience they have is new and untested. That would stress me out, too.