Or something. What I'm getting at here is that Josie is showing early signs of sugar addiction. This will come as something less than a shock to those of you who are familiar with my eating habits, and those of my beloved Babymamma. To put it in pretty stark terms, I'll just report that my cholesterol test last year revealed a triglyceride level of 333. Your triglycerides -- which are largely based on how much sugar you consume -- are considered "high" if they're above 150. So I'm basically walking about with red liquid sucrose coursing through my veins. This is what happens when you eat at least one piece of candy every day of your life, and usually more like seven. Along with ice cream, cakes, cookies, and the assorted toaster pastry.
But obviously, I'm an adult. And as an American. It's my right, maybe even my obligation, to clog my system with this kind of garbage. It's my own form of self-medication. The problem is that we're now influencing our bambina. Because she really does, honest to God, wake up with Kook-kooks (i.e. cookies) as her central preoccupation. And now that she can say kook-kook, it's her every other word. She'll march into the kitchen and point urgently to the spare high chair (which has become a de facto carb storage facility) and coo "kook kooks?" Then, when we explain to her that it's time for breakfast, not kook kooks, she'll scamper over to the diaper bag and start rifling through the various pockets, muttering "kook kook" to herself. If that doesn't work, she'll head for the kitchen counter, where we keep the animal crackers. Same deal.
Babymamma and I have certainly tried to limit our sweets consumption when she's up. All the horrible baby books, particularly the ones about "healthy eating" make it clear that the kids pick up their cues from you and that if you so much as bite into a Fig Newton with them watching they'll grow up to become junkies. We don't want Josie to grow up to become a junkie. And yes, we're trying to work the fruit thing as much as we can. But the truth is, now that she knows the kook kooks are out there, she can't be deterred. And truthfully, there are times when she gets upset and we basically give in and give her a kook kook. Are we totally screwing her up?
Babymamma and I are not big on instilling neurotic patterns around eating. There's enough craziness in the culture at large about food, particularly for girls. But we do worry about establishing bad patterns early on, where sweets come to equal love. I mean geez: look at me. And my triglycerides.
My point is: What do you guys do? How big a deal is this? Are we going to hell? With they have kook kooks there?
