Like any 4 year old, Jonathan is getting more and more picky about his food. If he were not growing and vital we would actually be concerned, but turns out you can really live on chocolate... sharing his food and other possessions is another format of avoiding having to eat it all himself.
We are now in the phase in which we try, rather unsuccessfully, to give Jonathan good eating principles that will hopefully sustain him as a healthy human being for the rest of his life. Parallel to his learning all about different foods and their components in kindergarten (yes! They learn about Carbohydrates and Proteins, vegetables, fruit, meat, and water...the whole nutrition pyramid is displayed on the kindergarten calls wall) we try to make him see the difference between food and desert. By now he has learned the mantra and he chants just like mommy “first we eat food and then desert”. He just interprets this mantra differently. While I refer to it in every meal, as far and Jonathan is concerned, it counts for the entire day. Thus, to his logic, if he ate his chicken and pasta in Kindergarten for lunch, then it time for chocolate in the evening at home – after all lunch comes before supper and he ate food for lunch, so supper can consist of desert! I thus get a full report of what he has eaten all day (he spends 8 hours a say in day care) and then expects to receive his due desert.
We have lively discussions what is considered food and what desert. For Jonathan chocolate pudding with cream that comes in a plastic cup form the supermarket is a yogurt, and so it belongs to the category of food, as does a chocolate spread sandwich and various fruit. In fact the only form of chocolate he accepts as desert in chocolate tablets. He also differs between a snack (waffle, potato chips, chocolate bar etc.) and desert. Snacks are in fact food for him. In every management training session I have been through, the coach hammers into our brains that listening is not only hearing but interpreting the words. What people interpret is what they understand and how they conceive the world around them – so the professional say. I say, kids are the best business coaches! They do indeed conceive the world in their own light and are ruthless to compromise about such conceptions. They run a hard bargain and negotiate their position in the household anew every minute of the day. Being a parent is a continuous exercise in crisis management.
Food is a great theme with Jonathan. Like a good Israeli he knows by now that life is all about food. Jewish holidays are celebrated according to the rule “they tried to kill us, they failed, lets eat!” Jonathan knows that when you have guests you are supposed to feed them!. In preparation for his birthday party (family was invited) he set out plates and cups in advance and would have poured out juice and distributed cookies to every guest that had not yet arrived if I had not stopped him. It was truly hard to convince him to wait until the guests were actually present to enjoy his treats.
Whenever he talks about inviting a friend over, he also talks about the treats he will distribute among his guests and sometimes he starts to put out plates and cups “for the children” who are to come sometime in the near future.
His tendency to feed people does not however remain only as a fantasy. Whenever my parents come to visit, Jonathan immediately invites them to partake in his most favorite drink – peach syrup with water. He runs to the kitchen to get cups and the syrup and is ready to oblige his guests on a moment's notice. It is entirely irrelevant to him that my father is not permitted to drink the stuff and that my mother does not really like it. He reasons that “it is very sweet” and therefore very tasty, so all must try it. Any visitors are happily “adopted” and fed. He offers friends of his father his favorite chocolate pudding and insists on sharing his pancakes with present guests.
His food sharing is not limited however to friends and visitors only. He also expressed his concern for the baby (I am pregnant) recently by forcing me to eat a cookie. My protests were in vain! Jonathan reasoned that the baby needs to eat the cookie, not mommy, and so I was left with no choice but to eat it, as Jonathan was also literally shoving it down my throat and refusing to take no for an answer.
Jonathan does not only wan to to share his food. He wants to give gifts to all. He has written “letters” for the children in his kindergarten (scribbling letter like shapes onto a paper, folding it and then covering ti with sticky tape so the “letter” does not open up), he gives away DVD's to visitors and insists on giving away little toys and trinkets. He does not however seem to understand that once he has given something as a gift it no longer returns to his possession. My efforts to explain this included hiding some DVD's he allegedly gave away, but even this did not help. As long as the DVD was not in its usual place, Jonathan simply was not looking for it (absence makes the heart forgetful...)
Jonathan also likes to share his bath, especially with mommy. He has recently argued that the baby likes the water and that is why mommy should climb into the bath tub with him. Declaring to me that he remembers that the net is not to be taken out, so that mommy's hair will not go into the sewage and block it, was used to further tempt me to accept his invitation to hare his bath. Spurs of kindness and concern for the well being of others are demonstrated also on other occasions. He can lecture to my friends when we meet them at the mall that its is really nice to come by to his home and play with his toys there, and that they really should come by. He can give a sermon about the fact that orange juice is healthy for you and he also covered his grandma with a warm blanket when she dosed off on the sofa in the TV room, while trying to provide Jonathan with some company while mommy was trying to rest.
Jonathan is really big on company! He does not like being alone in various rooms in the house and would have me ideally follow him around all day. He likes it when people come to visit and has no problem sharing toys and food with visiting adults. With children its more difficult, then he gets more possessive. While he loves to invite friends or to visit them, in practice they still play next to each other rather than with each other. He grumbles and whines when they touch his toys and does not like to take turns even though he knows he must. Then out of the blue he goes back to sharing mode – bringing treats to the visiting child and his parents, giving them all his “letter” gifts, crying when they say its time to leave and go home and not calming down even when they promise to come again soon. One TV show later and the scene is but forgotten. Absence does make the heart forgetful and TV is indeed the modern babysitter and child calming mechanism of our times!
