A boy who knows what he wants . . .

 

The other night Elliot was really testing us with his refusal to eat dinner. He would squish it through his fingers, toss it to Nacho, put in his mouth and immediately spit it out all over, but he would not just eat the darn stuff. I was getting so frustrated that I was half-contemplating force-feeding him. (It's not like we can just let him go hungry, because we will be the ones who suffer when he wakes up in the night crying with an empty tummy.)

So there we were, wondering what sort of magical parent ingenuity we could come up with so he would just eat his damn dinner, when all of a sudden, he started pointing and saying "nana" and nodding. We were so uptight about getting him to eat that we didn't twig on right away what he was trying to say, so he kept pointing and repeating "nana" and nodding. Finally, we looked over to where he was pointing and oh my gosh, he was pointing to bananas! He was asking for a banana by name! Elliot was communicating!

We quickly forgot all about our food frustrations and decided that that sort of genius deserves a reward and peeled him a banana which he quickly gobbled down. It was a magnificent moment, that wasn't nearly so magnificent at three in the morning when Elliot woke up hungry!