My son loves pudding cups. Joshua has 2 snack times a day one at 10am and another one after his nap.Often the first words he mutters while racing to his spot at the kitchen table are " Choco puddin' cup pwease." Now even though they are fairly rich in calcium I know that they are not the healthiest of snacks so I mix it up a bit and sometimes he gets a yogurt instead. He almost always has a banana with it and maybe something else if we have it on hand. Recently when opening Joshua's pudding cup I had a thought. I grabbed the cup out of the fridge, I peeled back the plastic lid and I paused for just a second as I brought the lid towards my mouth and I thought, "Why must I lick this?"
I've given Joshua roughly a hundred snacks in the last few months. Do you know how many lids I've licked? Every single one! Why am I compelled to do this? Just the tiniest bid of pudding and yogurt hide somehow adhered to lids of their containers and every time I open one I just can't resist giving it a lick. This action came into focus for me the other day because the licking almost always leads to the opening of another container and me consuming it. I've been trying not to eat a snack every time Joshua does because someone 28 just does not need the same caloric intake as a 3 year old. a few days ago when I was trying to keep with my new no snack plan I noticed just how tempting it is to lick that lid and inevitably once I have licked it I think,"mmm that was good I should have one too." I found myself faced with this question, "when did the licking of the lid begin and how has it become a reflex."
I have no idea why I do this. Did it begin when I little and I got to lick the beaters when my mother was making a cake? Perhaps that mentality has carried over into other parts of my snacking realm. I'm not sure, but I do know that the more I thought about it the more I times I found myself doing it. The pudding, the yogurt, the flap on the ice cream, I even did it when I opened up a fresh chip dip container! It's like a gateway into snacking, one lick and I'm hooked.
This got me wondering....how many other people have this unstoppable urge to lick the lid?
Yeah, I'm a lid licker. And a person who will grab a plastic spatula to make sure every last drop of cake batter is gone before the bowl can hit the sink. I also like raw cookie dough better than I like baked cookies. Although I'm a fan of baked cookies too. Today I ate a sandwich out of a box at meeting luncheon. I nearly ate the monster cookie before I ate the turkey sandwich. And when lunch was over, there were six unopened boxes. I wanted to open the boxes and steal the cookies, but I didn't. This all reminds me of the movie Pinocchio, which I haven't seen since our boys were litte. There's a scene when Jiminy Cricket says, "Hey, Pincoke, you know who he is don't cha?" "Why of course, Mr. Cricket, he's Honest John." "No," Jiminey says, "his name is temptation."
ReplyDeleteLike Steve I always lick the lid, and the bowls of cake and brownie batter. For a strange reason, I detest cookie dough. Now hot, gooey cookies from the oven with a cold glass of milk (yes, I'm a dunker too) are another story, but raw dough, I'll pass thanks.
ReplyDeleteMy kids are old enough to open their own lids, but I guess I did lick their lids when they were younger. I don't remember having to opent another container though.
I never lick the lid, but this post was hysterical!
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