"Is he a good eater?" she asked.
"Oh, yeah!" I answered immediately, nodding.
I was thinking of how much he enjoys eating lemon and lime slices, the toppings and sauce off his pizza before tearing up and hurling away the crust (and after discarding the pepperoni), how much pleasure he gets from munching on green onion stalks, basil sprigs, and fresh stevia, from biting into the grape tomatoes growing in the yard -- one bite per tomato, then on to the next one.
How much he likes dipping his fingers into a bowl of fiery hot homemade chili and picking out beans to eat, one by one. Eating a few curds of my scrambled eggs, then running over to Don's side of the table and eating a few of his. Sucking on an iced-tea popsicle. Chewing on one orange section after another, throwing out the expended pulp in between slices. Sitting on the couch watching Spongebob with a hot dog (no roll) in his fist. Running to the hanging basket where he knows we keep a sack of fortune cookies for him, and pointing till we get the message.
But then I remembered that he won't eat a single bite that he doesn't want to. That after only a month or so of taking baby foods -- homemade or jarred, cereals, that sort of thing -- he clamped down and plumb stopped eating it. That he won't eat even a crumb of anything he doesn't want to, and that repeat attempts turn up tears. It occured to me that this would be a huge problem for someone who believed he should be eating what he's told. Or eating a certain set of things.
I thought of how he runs off the instant he's lost interest, his face and hands smeared with whatever was on his menu, and how we have to chase him down with a wet cloth in hopes of catching him before he gets his messy self to the furniture.
"Wait -- I don't know," I said to her. "What does that mean, a good eater?"
"You know what? I don't know what it means," she answered. "It's something I hear people say when they're talking about their children."
"Well, he likes eating what he wants to eat. And he keeps getting bigger and stronger. But he goes for days hardly eating anything. And if you were to try to sit him down and feed him something you wanted him to eat from start to finish, it would be -- it just wouldn't work," I said. I tried to imagine the agony everyone involved would suffer in such a scenario, and couldn't imagine wanting to put either one of us through it, or any good reason why. "So maybe some parents would not think of him as a good eater. But we're not those parents," I said with a shrug. "And anyway, he's still nursing."
We both looked over at U, sturdy and glowing.
"Looks like it's working to me!" she said.