What a great banana!

Sean - handing me a banana, "Mom can you peel this for me?"
Me - "What do you say?"
Sean,- "Please Mom, I love you!" (I have trained him well, pat myself on back)
Me - "Sure, buddy."
Sean - as he inspects the banana I hand him, "What a great banana!"

He is referring to the banana as 'great' because it is free from brown spots and strings. My kids won't eat bananas with brown spots! On the peel or on the actual banana. They like to look at the banana and hold their throats and make choking sounds. They act like spotted bananas are poison. If they only knew that food can be so much worse than spotted bananas!

I cannot begin to count how many bananas I have eaten for them. If my peeling reveals a hidden brown spot, they hand them right over to me. It is like returning damaged and defective goods to the store. I wish I could slap a red sticker on them and ship them off for a full refund! I wonder if I can get a recall on brown spotted bananas?

Sometimes I can hide them. I turn the banana so that the brown spot faces out when I hand it to them. Or I tell them I will give them a dollar to eat it as fast as they can - this way they don't have time to notice the brown spots! If the spot is close to one of the ends, I just break the banana off.

As they get older, though, they are catching on to my sneaky ways. Brian and Sean will now rotate their arms around in freakish ways just to get a look at the back side of the banana. I think that their wrists are part barn owl. But they have not won yet - I am still smarter. Well, sometimes.

My trick is to take a perfect banana and act like I am trying to hide a brown spot. Then when they twist their arms and hands around in every conceivable way, there is nothing there! I figure that if they check, and find nothing often enough, that they will go back to not checking. Maybe, just maybe.

I have to say that I can't really blame them, I don't like spots on my bananas either - nor do I like spots on the outside. I like bananas barely ripe- even with a little green still on the peel. I think the spotty ones are only good for banana bread or muffins - or maybe for baby food!

Did you ever notice that baby food bananas really taste nothing like bananas? But, yet, there they are, listed on the ingredients - fully ripened bananas, citric acid and ascorbic acid. And there is a picture of bananas on the front. So it must be bananas. But the bananas on the front have no spots. Doesn't 'fully ripened' mean the ones with spots? I guess old brown spotted bananas pictured on the front wouldn't sell much baby food. But it would explain how it tastes!

I told Sean " On a banana, the brown spots are bruises - like you get on your legs from falling down." He asked, "How do bananas get bruises if they can't run?" Hmmm Let me count the ways. I told him, "Bananas get bruises when you throw them into the cart, when you put a two liter of soda on top of them, when you step on them while trying to be first out of the car, when they get flung across the kitchen because you are mad, when you use them as a ramp for cars, when you hide them behind furniture, or when you pretend they are laser guns!" He smiled and seemed satisfied with that answer. He then said, "Well. I'm still not eating them!"

My kids also don't eat bananas with the 'strings' still on them either. I am not sure if their is a technical term for banana strings. There probably is, but for now I will go with string. They scrunch up their faces and point to the pieces hanging from the banana. Eeeek! It's a boogie. It's a bug. No, it's a banana string!

They inspect the bananas closely and make me peel off every last one. I am surprised that they haven't broken out their magnifying glasses! Again, guilty here because I do that for the ones I eat too! Maybe I should just stop buying bananas. Or tell them that if they don't eat the ones with the spots that I wont buy anymore. Maybe I will have to save that for later if the 'pretend there is a brown spot' conditioning doesn't pay off...