The trouble with kids is that they never eat when they have the chance. The better the opportunity, they less they eat. There is something about an abundance of good food that makes their appetites shut down. The example that comes to mind is Thanksgiving dinner.
Kids celebrate this particular holiday by putting a lot of food on their plates and then telling riddles or original jokes. Sometimes they fling peas or make turkey mustaches. The greatest joy of the festivities, though, is show-and-tell.
If you have had the distinct advantage of sitting furthest away from the kid table, you may have missed out on the “entertainment.”
It goes something like this, “I bet you can’t wiggle your ears.” In juvenile language that means, “Watch while I wiggle my ears.”
“Okay, but you can’t shut one eye.” (Like the Thin Man, in case you remember who that is.) “No, it’s not the same thing as winking.”
“Well look what I can do; I’m double-jointed in all my fingers.”
“So can you touch your nose with your tongue?”
“No. Neither can you!”
“I know, but my grandma can.”
“So, who has the biggest muscles?” (Out come all the arms, and up go all the sleeves, knocking over three drinks in the process.)
“You should see my mom’s biceps. They are about this high.” (Apparently Mom comes from the same gene pool as Hulk Hogan.)
Show-and-tell soon degenerates into innovative raw humor.
“Knock-knock.”
“Who’s there…”
“Window.”
“Window who?”
“Window Pane.”
You would think that so much mental exercise would create an energy deficit that would have to be corrected by the consumption of food. But sitting in front of a plate of food while telling tall tales seems to generate feelings of contentment, or maybe it’s self-satisfaction, without the actual ingestion of food.
After they joke truck has run out of gas, they will begin to declare the exact opposite about themselves.
“Mom, I’m full.”
“So am I.”
“Me too.” Superlatives aren’t even necessary anymore. They are full, and full is full.
No amount of reason, like threatening no dessert or no food until the next meal will change the condition of their stomachs. You can’t win. Just try to prove that they aren’t full.
You would think that as many times as their mothers run out of bread and milk, that the budding humorists would have the foresight to take advantage of a good thing. They won’t see that much food again for another year. They should know better than to take their chances.
There is only one thing that will get their appetites functioning again. Just clear the table and put all the food.
Suddenly life isn’t so funny anymore. The absence of nourishment in plain sight becomes a real stressful situation. No child is willing to gamble on there ever being any again.
They don’t realize what the real gamble is; so one of them will saunter into the room where the cooks have just sat down for the first time in three days and ask for a bowl of cereal.
In their hunger, they seem to have forgotten about the existence of gene pools and what kind of traits they just might carry.
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