Adventures in Refrigeration

Originally published Jan. 25, 2006.

My wee one has an obsession with food. This is something that has been a recurring theme throughout his life. My first child was such an incredibly neat eater that I literally never even had to wipe his hands or mouth when he got up from the table. I never owned a bib. Yes, I was a "smug parent" about this... for a little while. Then my daughter came along and seemed to be making up for her neat brother. She had food stains on her clothing until she was 4 years old and to this day is an embarrassment at the table. I thought we'd paid for that little bit of parental pride. I obviously thought wrong. Rather than just wearing some spaghetti on his clothes, he will choose to dump the entire bowl on his head. At 10 months of age this is a novelty. At 3 years of age, it is, well.... not. If left at the table with his siblings while eating, he will initiate a food fight, throwing every morsel of food he can get his hands on. I have blueberry stains on the walls to prove it, if you don't believe me. If left alone with something saucy, he will plunge his hands and forearms into the dish and then try furiously to de-sauce his arms on his shirt. I have been pegged in the forehead with seemingly unsatisfactory bits of morsels. He sits at the table the better part of a day, demanding food, receiving it, eating a bit then discarding it in whatever manner seems most appropriate given the tools at hand. Usually it involves some sort of earth-moving machinery and a screwdriver. I have never felt dread over food until he came along.

The refrigerator was his playground (please note the purposeful use of the past tense). Of course, I had missed out on this lovely aspect of childhood with my other two. From the time he was 18 months old (when he was finally big enough to open it himself), he would help himself to whatever he could find that would make a satisfying mess. Mostly it was eggs and parmesan cheese. Have you ever had a 2 lb. can of parmesan cheese dumped on your rug? Let me tell you, that is a LOT of parmesan cheese and it smells disturbingly like vomit. In a 4 month period we would go through 1 can a week. Sometimes I would find him doing it, but most times he would abscond with it to some part of the house in which I, oddly enough, was not present to gleefully dump it everywhere.

Eggs are his other pleasure. He started his egg rampage by just cracking them in the middle of the kitchen floor. He quickly learned, however, that if he were going to get through a whole carton uninterrupted he needed to find a nice, private place in which to do it, so he moved to a little nook behind some cabinets. If the house suddenly went silent, it was a sure bet you'd find him back there, cracking away, usually naked. If you've never experienced the mess of raw eggs on the floor, I highly recommend trying it just once. In a good week he could go through 2 dozen, easy.

From wanton cracking, he quickly progressed to cracking eggs into his toy kitchen's pans. I have to admit that I was suitably impressed by his egg cracking skills at this point, though I would rather have my eye-teeth pulled out than admit that to him. Most recently, just passed the age of 3, he decided he was ready for bigger stuff. Just before we got radical, I found my naked chef surrounded with freshly buttered pans (mine), eggs cracked in them sans shells (mostly), with one on the stove and him furiously trying to turn on the stove-top, spatula at the ready.

We tried everything to keep him out of the fridge, to no avail. This past weekend, however, we finally (FINALLY) nipped little Dennis's Adventures in Refrigeration in the bud. After over 18 months of angst, frustration and countless dollars in lost food (mostly consisting of organic eggs, parmesan cheese, chive cream cheese and Hershey's dark chocolate syrup), as well as 3 previous attempts to bar said thief from our cold-food storage using conventional "child-proofing" methods, our aggravation is at an end. Until he figures out how to use the bolt cutters or work the combinations (either of which is quite plausible), we no longer have to worry about food loss.