My child does not eat fruit. We sneak some into her with an occasional 100% juice serving, but she mostly spurns that, so her daily fruit consumption comes in the form of Trader Joe's freeze dried bananas. It's the only thing that resembles fresh fruit that enters her body. When asked, she will tell you -- and that IS a universal you because she is not shy with this information -- that it's "too juicy". When her beloved Miss A brought grapes for the weekly nutrition-in-the-garden activity, Darcy was the only student out of 900 Miss A sees every week who refused to taste it. Too juicy.
Despite this stubborn refusal to eat fruit, Darcy likes to play with pretend fruit (she has Melissa and Doug's wooden fruit that can be "cut" for a fruit salad because the pieces are velcroed together) and has long-term jokes/stories about fruit. For the longest time, she would talk about "mam fruit", always with a giggle, and when we moved to this house, she decreed that the dogwood fruits (ripe this time of year, about golf-ball sized, and red) are mam fruit. So she's really excited now because she just noticed that some of the mam fruit are ripe.
It took us months to figure out where she had come up with this term. One day, we were watching Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Friends and she said, "This is the one with the mam fruit!!" That perked me up and I watched carefully. In this particular episode, a firefly loses his glasses and while he's looking for them, he bumps into a fruit and says, "Oh! Excuse me, ma'am, have you seen my glasses?" Thus is born the mam fruit.
So it should not have surprised us when she created the lemange this weekend. A lemange is half lemon/half orange and it easily created when you own the Melissa and Doug fruit set described above. When I asked about the flavoring for her birthday cupcakes, she asked for lemange-flavored cupcakes and that's what she got, thanks to the miracle of lemon juice and orange extract. But the best part about this is that shortly after deciding on the name for this new creation, Darcy sat down with her paper and coloring supplies at her small table. When she was done, she came and showed us this paper:
I love that she can write. In sentences. With the correct spelling. And punctuation. And I love her imagination. I would love it even more if she could imagine herself EATING SOME FRESH FRUIT juice and all.
3 comments:
seriously, that girl is a genius. When I was little, I wanted ONLY juicy fruits (I thought bananas were disgusting until I was in my twenties: why? Not juicy ENOUGH) and even wanted the fruits I loved the most made into juices so that I could have more of the juicy goodness. So, my darling niece, you can have the M&D wood fruit, and please describe for me more about the deliciousness of lemanges.
Ha! Kailee has an aversion to red vegetables. Mostly because she's afraid I'm going to slip a tomato into her. I love the lemange! :)
I love this!
Post a Comment