wheat vs. white

well, my first actual post typed by my own fingers is appropriately driven by little laine. at laine's 4 year old doctor visit a few weeks ago, the doctor was asking what laine ate (trying to decide how concerned she should be about laine barely clinging to the weight/height charts.) I couldn't immediately think of anything that lainey ate reliably...so the doctor asked laine what she had for breakfast. that seems like a pretty innocuous question, generally, but on this particular day, laine proclaimed happily that she had had two pieces of bread. plain. white. no peanut butter or anything redeeming at all to elevate it from fluff to breakfast.

enter serious mother guilt!! no truly good mother would really let her child eat two pieces of plain white bread for breakfast, right? (granted, this is the same girl who, when planning her birthday party, said, "Mom, I don't want to eat any real food. I just want to eat cupcakes." what do you expect?)

well, anyway. guilt. so I stopped buying white bread. for the most part, laine responded by not eating bread anymore. I guess she's replaced it with air, which probably has a higher nutritional content anyway. but the kicker was when we were walking down the aisle at costco, surveying the multiplicity of wheat breads available, trying to choose one that tasted least like cardboard, and we walked away without a single loaf of white bread! the nerve. and laine asked as we walked away, "what, so you guys don't like white bread anymore?" to which Jim responded (of course), "NOPE." and can you guess the ending to this charming vignette? laine burst into tears on the spot, and sobbed up and down the aisles, in white bread withdrawal, until the flashing lights of the Christmas decorations already on display distracted her long enough to forget the pain (and probably the growling of her stomach now that the one staple of her diet has been removed!)