More This!

Sam takes a bite of a homemade strawberry-kiwi popsicle

Because I see them together so frequently, it’s easy to speculate what genes Sam got from my mother (the eyes, the love of fruit and reading), but whenever he eats there is no doubting that Sam is genetically related to my father. Sammy may not have that same one-bite-of-each-food-around-the-plate method that we all teased Jimmy Joe about, but Sam definitely loves food and he consumes it with a passion. Today while I cut up the ingredients for salsa he insisted on taking a bite of the onion.

“You won’t like it sammy. It’s hot.”

“I want it.”

“I don’t think you will like it.”

“I want it!”

He chewed on the chunk of raw white onion and swallowed and smiled even though his eyes were watering.

“I tried it, Mommy!” he said with pride.

Same with the lime from which he sucked every last fiber of pulp.

And the peppers.

But the big surprise of the day was when the hot turkey sausage that turned out to be hotter than I thought went down with hardly a pause between bites. I needed to follow each bite I took with a chip or a drink of milk, but not Sam.

“More this,” he said over and over again pointing to the empty place on his plate where the previous serving of hot turkey sausage had been. He inhaled two entire bratwurst-sized sausages before Mommy made the executive decision that his tummy might not be able to handle more than that. And he was not pleased when I told him he could eat as many strawberries and grapes as he liked but there was no more hot sausage.

Unbelievable. Jimmy Joe’s stomach reincarnated.