Serving Henrietta a plate loaded with all the things she usually eats and having her feel the need to go into long drawn out detail about why she is not going to eat certain things and how much she intends to eat of everything else. And all the while acting like she expects me to attempt to force feed her. I cannot possibly count the number of times I have said, “Henrietta, really, I don’t care. If you don’t want it, don’t eat it. You don’t have to tell me about it.” At this she looks a bit skeptical and says something under her breath like, “Well, I just don’t think I can digest it…..”. Sometimes I think she is disappointed there is no argument.

What’s really kind of funny is when I put a lot of something I know she particularly loves on her plate and she scarfs it all down and when I go to get her tray she tells me, very earnestly you understand, that I put too much, she can’t eat that much. This happened several times before she caught on that I wasn’t going to feel guilty about how much she ate. Every time, her plate is wiped completely clean when she is telling me this. When I point out that she DID, in fact, eat it all, she keeps insisting that it was too much. When asked, “Well, then why did you eat it?” She says, as if there was no way to help it, “Well, it was so good.” Of course when she tells me this I start laughing and then she giggles, too.