Fish

We all had a great afternoon. After swimming at the pool we went to the grocery store across the street to buy dinner stuff. We thought we were making Chinese dumplings but they had nice, fresh-looking whole snappers on sale so we bought one to steam. Lucas was quite interested.

At home dad unwrapped the fish to clean it and Lucas asked, "I wanna hold it!" Why not, I thought.
Luke was very excited about holding the fish. When he was done he gave it back to dad and went into the bathroom to wash his hands with mom. "Daddy let me hold the fish! Really big fish. Nice of him!" He thought and then added, "I say thank you to him." With that he ran back out to the kitchen and blurted out: "Thank you holding the fish for me dada!" Then he watched me clean and slit the fish and helped me rub salt into the skin.

Mom and Lucas sat down for dinner with the fried rice and bok choy, and dad went to get the steamed fish. "Yay, fish!" Lucas beamed.

We served him some fish and, after lots of giddy talk about how exciting it was to have the whole fish for dinner, he took a giant bite and spit it out. "I don't like the fish." But then he spotted the tail and announced that he wanted to eat that. So we picked a nice chunk of tail meat off and served it to him. "Mmmmm!" There is really no difference between the tail meat and the rest, but he loved it.

He also loved the fried rice. We served him two huge, adult-sized portions and he nearly finished the second. "What's in the rice, dada? It's bad for my teeth?" He must have sensed my puzzlement and quickly added: "Sugar in it?" Something so delicious must be bad for you. "Well, there's about a half teaspoon of sugar but that's not very much." He nodded approvingly. "There's also pork [nodding], scallions [nodding], egg [nodding], soy sauce [nodding], oyster sauce [nodding], rice wine [nodding], and sesame oil [nodding]." That satisfied him. (The nodding as I explained the ingredients was pretty hilarious. He seemed to be making a show of having a sophisticated dinner conversation with us.)

Between huge forksful of fried rice Lucas kept asking for more tail pieces, so I dug through the serving dish for hunks of meat and announced that I had just found a little more tail meat. "Mmmmm!" Repeat several times.

After about his tenth big bite of "tail meat" he announced impishly: "I'm going to turn into a fish!" We all laughed and told him that we thought he might turn into some fried rice too. "I turn into rice monster!"