The white post

So, we’re off to the outlaws in France on Thursday and I have been dutifully cooking all the perishable food in the fridge. Yesterday was a good courgette pan fry with peppers and quorn, today there was only some cauliflower, celeriac, aubergine and potato left, apart from the salad stuff.

So, I roasted aubergine and celeriac, steamed the cauliflower and baked potato, put it all on the plate and… it was all white. Apart from a few skins of course. I think if you’d asked me to plan a white meal I may have struggled but now I think it may have to be the theme of my next dinner party.

For his part, the star of this blog is mainly eating white food as well, as in bottles of milk, pots of plain yoghurt and bowls of porridge. He has a fearsome cold, blocked sinuses and a hacking ccugh, which means of course that I have it too now because it is highly amusing to bite one’s parents in the face and generally slobber all over them. Ha ha ha. Perhaps this is the White Food Virus. So far the Frog is germ-free however he is much less receptive to the general pawing about that I seem to accept from the spud in the name of motherly love. Either way, we have to start eating real food soon or there will be way too much of us to go around.

His most recent trick, the Spud’s that is, the Frog has no recent tricks, is to attempt to mount one like a horse every time one crouches or bends down. This means that the simple act of cleaning the floor under his high chair is now fraught with the danger of standing up while he is clinging on, not to mention the inconvenience of trying to hand-scrub pasta sauce off the laminate while a 33 pound monster is clinging to one’s bottom.

Oh go on, laugh. Should he succeed in climbing on (normally with help) he is so proud and happy that we have to inch past a mirror so he can preen at his reflection, pushing himself upright into a proper sit for a second and tucking in his chin for a coy smirk before resuming his giggling, petrified strangle-hold on a parental neck.

This evening I did some gardening after picking him up from his childminder. You can imagine the rest, me dutifully planting aquilegia seedlings with him scrabbling away behind me. Every time I knelt upright to reach into the compost bag he would swing from my shoulders like an enormous goiter. When he got bored of that he spent some careful time sliding his hands under my shirt and grasping thoughtfully at my spare tire as if weighing it up and comparing it to his own. ‘One day’ I could hear him think ‘One day I too will carry this interesting soft stuff in bags around my waist.’ The neighbours must be completely agog. At least he didn’t try to drag a boob out with both hands as he did the other day nearly every day last week. He may have a vestigial mammary memory that once upon a time in a place far away there was a magic land of Boob but I think it’s a sensory thing – he just likes the feeling of all the vast softness in which I am clad these days.

Which takes me back to my current diet, or lack thereof. White food just screams ‘carbohydrates’ and so I think I am going to have to review the colour scheme in my fridge. For now, I am going to take my white sinus pills, some white Kleenex and drag my pale, sick arse into bed with my lovely warm frog.

anon.