I don’t know why Hayley is so suspicious of me sometimes. You would think I have some habit of tricking her, but I really don’t. I can think of all of two times that I’ve really intentionally tricked her.

One instance is was back when she first started table food and didn’t like the texture of vegetables, I would make spaghetti sauce by using a blender to mix the vegetables in with tomato sauce and she happily ate it without ever realizing it contained peas, carrots, and beans.

Another was more recently when she had taken to showing her displeasure at bath time ending by attempting to empty as much water out on to the floor as possible in a fit of anger. I solved that a few times by asking her to stand up for a second and when she would do so, thinking I was going to wash her legs, I would scoop her right out before she could get mad.

But really, tricking her is not something that I go about doing every day. So I don’t know why she gets so suspicious.

There were no leftovers from last night’s supper to eat at lunch today so I thought maybe she’d like a sandwich “like Daddy eats” for lunch. I told her it was pepperoni and she would really enjoy it. She immediately instructed, “No mustard!” I already know she doesn’t like mustard so I agreed.

As I was assembling the sandwich, she ran into the kitchen and again reminded me, “No mustard!” I explained that there was no mustard on her sandwich, that I had just put a bit of margarine on the bread.

She started eating her sandwich like most kids her age, by pulling the whole thing apart to eat it separately. She held one piece of bread very close to her eyes, studying it critically. “There IS mustard on this!” she declared. I told her that I had NOT put any mustard on it and that it was just margarine. She looked at it some more, licked it, and finally agreed, “Okay, just margarine.”

Jeez. It’s like an inquisition just serving food around here.

(And now I had to stop eating to go see what she was doing because it sounded cute; she’s in her room singing, “Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep my little babies” to her rats. The rats are staring at her like they’re thinking they’ll never be able to sleep with someone singing so loudly. Ha!)