My boss has been telling me for a while that two children this close together will be complete opposites. (He should know, since last year he had three children in the same high school). If your first child loves to clean, get ready for your second child to never clean a thing. It doesn’t matter what it is, they’re just going to be different.
But G loves food, I thought. He ate the cupcake at his birthday party, I thought. What kid doesn’t like cake? I thought. It didn’t occur to me that I could put a large cake in front of him, and he wouldn’t touch it. E’s cake smash stopped only when Tom and I decided that he had eaten enough, and we had enough pictures. Otherwise he would have eaten the entity of that cake.
Well, we got photos of G. A lot of cute ones, actually. But in most of them he’s either not touching the cake, or he’s eating puffs that I was bribing him with. As soon as he touched the frosting, he started crying. He didn’t want to touch it, and he definitely didn’t want to eat it. I was so confused, I thought maybe he just didn’t understand what it was. I tried putting some cake in his mouth to show him it was food, and he just blew raspberries back at me, trying to push it out of his mouth.
I seriously kept trying because I didn’t understand how this kid who has never not eaten anything, wouldn’t eat this cake. But it seems like he doesn’t really have a sweet tooth. Since then we tried giving him cinnamon buns that we made on Christmas, and he didn’t really want those either. I think it’s the frosting that’s weird for him, because after we cleaned up the cake smash we gave him some of the plain cake, and he ate that. It was actually a banana bread that I had frosted as a cake (same as I’d done with E), and kid loves bananas.
Well, we tried. All we can do as parents is offer things, and it’s up to them to decide what’s for them or not. I assume some day we’ll look back at this and laugh (okay we’re laughing a bit now), but mostly I hope that G will look back and see that we loved him so much, we baked him an entire cake for his birthday and offered him the chance to stuff his face with it.
