Trap lurks in uneaten dessert

Press, 23 October 1989, Page 4

Trap lurks in uneaten dessert

Wilson’s week

A warning to fathers. Never, never clean the remains from your five-year-old’s dessert dish. You will be found out and exposed as the household greedy-guts. This can be embarrassing, especially if you have just politely declined your wife’s very kind offer to finish the dessert cake, patting your tummy and saying: “No, no. Must remember my waistline.” As sure as the eggs that went into the cake, your son will at this very moment appear at the lounge door and demand: “Somebody’s been eating from my bowl!” Father bear, at this point, adopts a particularly guilty and furtive look and tries to bluster his way out of the trap. “Have you not eaten your dessert?” he says in a gruff voice. "How could I? You finished the plate,” says the kid in suitably hurt tones that must have required hours of practice. “Ah ha!” says my wife with glee.

“Sprung!” Gulp. Think man, this looks bad. Not only looks bad, it is bad. “He said he had finished. Didn’t like your dessert! Screwed his nose up at it. Dumped it on the kitchen sink and went to play!” All eyes turn to the child. “I put it down for a few minutes. Daddy came along and gobbled my dessert!” The score in this game of guilt tennis is around 15-love to the kid so far. My serve. “He said he had finished. I didn’t want to see perfectly good food \\ go to waste so . .” “So you pigged it,” my wife says, a definite grin on her face, which makes me suspect she is enjoying this opportunity to see her husband squirm before the inquisition. Let us consider the

optional responses: I could stick with the truth, which is as I have claimed throughout. He had converted a perfectly nice dessert into something more at home inside a concrete mixer. But this he will never admit to, because that biscuit after dinner was only obtained on the promise that, yes, he had emptied his plate. To confess he had stretched the parameters of the truth would mean a deficit in biscuits tomorrow. So he will stick with his story and I will stick with mine. I could deliver one of > those lectures my own y mother delivered to me often enough: “Eat your dinner, thousands of children in other countries are starving.” That only made me feel more guilty. Anyway I hated carrots. “Fighter pilots in- the

war ate them. Gave them excellent night sight for chasing enemy aircraft," Mum replied. Years later I learned about radar and from that day on loathed carrots. “Well?” asks my wife, interrrupting the reverie. “Who pigged the dessert?” “Him!. Him!” say two voices. It’s no good. I’ll have to take the rap or this debate will rage all night, which might just be the boy’s latest ploy to avoid going to bed. I confess. Suitable looks of chastisement are levelled in my direction. The boy looks smug ... I tell him, no hard feelings. I put him to bed annd offer to tell a bedtime story. It’s the one about the little boy who won’t eat his dessert — and gets made to eat carrots for the rest of his life. -DAVE WILSON