Breakfast

Hugo has been a stinker about breakfast lately.  He doesn't want to eat cereal anymore.  Let me rephrase that...  Hugo doesn't want to eat non sugared cereal anymore.  He has always eaten Cheerios or Honey Bunches of Oats or something along those lines.  Now he'll only eat Cheerios when forced and he wants nothing to do with raisins anymore.  Or so he says.  I ran out of the classic black raisins last week.  Cesar pulled out a bag of golden raisins I had squirreled away in a cupboard for baking.  When Hugo saw the golden raisins in her cereal instead of the classic black raisins, he freaked.  Went nutso.  Swore up and down that he would not eat the yellow raisins.  "Well," I said, "ya eat yellow grapes, right?!"  He didn't budge. 

During the long winter months, one thing I look forward to is all the yellow and pink grapefruit in the markets.  I looooove grapefruit!  I have memories of GG peeling grapefruit like an orange and eating the sections as she sat in her chair in the sun room.  She'd slice the the fruit in half and around each section for me.  I'd sit at the tiny table in her kitchen, beneath the window, and eat the grapefruit with a special spoon GG set out for me, it had little teeth to aid in scooping out all the tangy flesh and they sometimes hurt my lips.  The spoons also had bamboo handles and I've often wondered what became of those grapefruit spoons.  To get me to eat the crust of my toast, GG would slather the discarded crusts with more jam.  Her trick worked.

Last winter Hugo finally tried a bite of grapefruit with me, he loved it.  The past few days he has been devouring an entire grapefruit all on his own.  Once finished, he waits for me to squeeze out the juice so he can drink it down.  Yum!  My tongue is all salivating thinking of the delicious juice. 

I do sprinkle a wee bit of sugar on the flesh of this winter fruit.  Not much mind you.  This morning I left the sugar bowl out on the counter.  I didn't do it on purpose.  I didn't even remember not putting it straight back into the cupboard as I usually do.  I figured it out as I dressed the girls this morning.  Sabine had something stuck all over her face and in the front wings of her hair.  I was stumped as to what it was.  A memory of Hugo crawling over the counters to lick the sugar bowl on a daily basis popped into my head.  This memory is exactly the reason why I now put the sugar bowl up in the cupboard right away after each use.  Sabine.  Silent, but deadly.  Sure enough, the kitchen counter had scattered sugar bits here and there.  The top and sides of the sugar bowl were crusted over with a thick layer of toddler licked sugar goodness.  Even the stool she climbed down from was covered in sugar snot. 

My father swears that he remained so skinny throughout high school, because my Grandmother Ruby made him eat half a grapefruit each morning.