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Don't worry, sweetie, Mommy will eat that
I would never take candy from a baby. Or so I used to think. But Halloween's not
even here yet and already I've tucked into some of my toddler's loot.
``It's for his own good,'' I told myself as I rummaged through a goodie bag he got at a party Saturday, carefully removing all the chocolate. Yummm. I'd forgotten how good Mounds bars are.
People think losing pregnancy weight is hard. But if you ask me, a mom's trouble really starts when the pregnancy is but a distant, round memory and the infant turns into a person with nutritional needs that can't be met with rice cereal and strained peas.
``I've become a human garbage can,'' the mother of a 10-year-old boy told me the other day, her voice muffled by a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. She'd made it for her son, but he was more interested in his skateboard.
``He's outside, burning calories,'' she said, taking a swig of his fruit punch, ``and I'm having two lunches.''
But what's a mother to do? Any woman in her right mind knows she'd be safer living with a loaded gun in the house than a jar of Skippy, and yet, as a Good Mom, she's forced to stock her kitchen with food for growing children: orange juice, animal crackers, string cheese.
One of my best friends is on what she describes as the ``Mommy Diet.'' It's a high-fat, high-cal, high-carb regimen that calls for snacking throughout the day and eating six full meals. Weight gain is guaranteed!
`You know how Weight Watchers tells you to write down everything you put in your mouth?'' my friend asked. ``My list would be nine pages long - 20 grapes, a quarter of a bagel, two bites of a sodden grilled cheese sandwich, half a juice box, six ounces of whole-milk yogurt - which by the way is much better than that low-fat stuff.''
You don't hear much about it but, like grief, the Mommy Diet has several stages:
Gorging on kiddie food starts, as so many things do, innocently. What harm could a Cheerio do, you ask as you pop one in your mouth while lovingly feeding your baby.
You know how they say casual drug use leads to harder stuff? The same dynamic is at work with carbohydrates. You start with Cheerios, then move on to Gerber's Biter Biscuits (only 45 calories each). From there, it's the jarred apricots (which are delicious over ice cream, by the way) and next thing you know, you're pouring whole milk into your cereal.
Then dishonesty sets in. ``I've snuck out of Samantha's room, dashed into the kitchen and wolfed down Ben & Jerry's while she was doing a puzzle,'' a toddler's mom told me. It felt like ``cheating'' on her child, she said, ``but there wasn't that much ice cream left and I wanted it more than she did.''
When the daughter noticed Mom was missing, my friend quickened her pace. ``I got an ice cream headache,'' she said.
That headache was her wake-up call. Mine came yesterday, after my son asked for chocolate and I was forced to face up to what I'd done. ``We don't have any,'' I said, quickly hiding a wrapper. ``How about a nice apple?''
Later that night, after he went to bed with no after-dinner treat, I tried on a skirt that used to fit and looked at myself in the mirror.
``My name is Mommy,'' I said, gasping for breath, ``and I have a problem.''