Food Stalker

My daughter shall never starve even if lost in the woods if her innate hunter/gatherer/forager skills are any indication. This child finds hidden stashes of candy from Saint Valentine's Day and beyond and leaves no trace of the theft because she also consumes the wrappers.



By following her older siblings around, she can usually get the prime scraps from whatever they've decided to have for snack. Between her natural cupie doll looks and her fierce toddler will, "Can I have some, can I have some, can I have some, can I have some?" that enables her to repeat those same four words tirelessly for 20 minutes at a time if necessary; she gets extra slices of pizza from her older brothers, bags of chips from the team snack, bonus cookies at bake sales and a near unlimited supply of drinks. All of this was bad enough, but now she's become independent.



The food she acquires through persuasion is insufficient to meet her caloric needs. Breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack plus second breakfast which the next older brother views as a constitutional right rather than an eccentric dining convention of hobbits, are not enough. She can open the fridge. She can open the freezer, and using a chair, she can get to the higher shelves in the pantry. I’ve taken to putting “boring food” in front of the desired cereals, cookies, crackers and chips, but it gets hard sometimes to find things as a result. This past weekend, her father brought home a bag of apples and a box of clementines. I'm thinking, we're set for the week for fruit for the lunches. Yeah!



On Monday, she found the apples. I'm not sure what I was doing at the time. Maybe feeding/changing her brother, maybe making the bed or switching the laundry, but I came into the kitchen and noticed the apples were not in their basket. The basket was empty. I hunted. I called. The house was silent.



I began patrolling the rooms; first the upstairs, no one under the bed, no one in the closet having a picnic, no evidence hidden in a waste basket. On the main floor, my room was clean, the bathrooms, empty, the study and the dining room, vacant. Panic was seizing me. The apples had been gone at least ten minutes if not more. Downstairs I raced. The main room was a mess as usual but no kids. The kid's study was also quiet. The girl's room and bathroom needed sprucing but there was no trace of my three toddlers or the apples. Now where to look? I came back up puzzling and calling. Then I saw them.



On the screened in deck, they had 12 apples on their kid table, still unconsumed and three that were happily being crunched. The apples were in a line and the three of them were trying to put ten apples up on top. The fruit kept rolling but the oldest patiently kept trying to place one or two on top of his head and wondering why they wouldn't stay. The next oldest was holding the inspirational book open to the page and pointing.


I gathered up the fruit that was still unbruised, bagged it in a Ziplock and placed it in the back of the refrigerator on the top shelf. “There.” I thought to myself.


In the afternoon, the box of clementines went AWOL.