Procrastinet

My Son Likes Spicy Food... On My Shirt!

filed under: Dadditudes

On Sunday, to properly enjoy our lovely early-Spring day, we splurged on dinner at Two Boots in Park Slope. We ordered Max the pizza face, as usual, hoping this time he'd actually eat it rather than fling it or straightarm it ("n'O! n'O! N'O!").

Despite having demanded many handfuls of fish ("fiss!") during the almost-bad-enough-to-get-annoyed-but-it's-too-nice-out-to-bother delay in service, Max had plenty of appetite left for pizza face, and began cramming it into his mouth by the handful as fast as we could chop it up.

Partway through his first mouthful, he started to look a little wild-eyed. "Ooo!" he said, but after a pause resumed stuffing pizza into himself.

After a moment, he went "OOOO!" again and began hopping a bit in his chair. He looked around frantically, and then grabbed my sleeve with both (saucy) hands and buried his face in my arm.

I should explain: Max has, recently, begun shoving his face into various parts of his mother and I. And sniffing/snuffling. For comfort. Each diaper change means sacrificing our left elbow for a good couple minutes of snuffling.

Who knows.

Anyway, he snuffled around on my shoulder for a bit, then grabbed another bite of pizza. This time he burst into tears and swung his head at my arm again, with his tongue out, and gave my sleeve a good licking/snuffling.

"Maybe it's spicy?" said Lisa. He did seem to be purposely wiping his tongue off on my sleeve. I grabbed a piece of pizza and sure enough, the sauce had a pretty pronounced kick on the back end. Not super duper hot, but probably pretty startling for a kid who's never had anything much zestier than a fish stick.

But man, he couldn't get enough of the stuff. Even though every third bite made him burst into tears, as soon as he had thoroughly wiped his tongue off on my sleeve, he'd grab another handful.

"That's spicy food for you, buddy," said his mother, "even when it makes you sad you just want to keep eating it."

At one point, when he was running out of clean bits of my shirt to stick his tongue on, he realized he was using only my dark blue outer shirt when there was a crisp white undershirt available as virgin territory. His eyes lit up like firecrackers. "Ha HA!" he seemed to be saying, "that WHITE shirt will be JUST the relief I need!" He scrambled most of the way out of his high chair, clawing his way across my chest, and stuffed handfuls of my t-shirt into his mouth. He snuffled a bit and sucked on it while staring up at me contentedly.

It's an odd experience to realize that a table full of cute young women is staring at you in bemused fascination while your toddler son sucks at your chest like a lamprey. "It's, uh, spicy," I explained, feeling proud and lame all at once.

The nice thing about living in Park Slope (stroller central) is that you can walk down the street in a full-body crust of pizza sauce and no one will look at you twice.

Posted by rjt at April 14, 2005 10:38 AM