How Do You Eat Your Toast?

All you can do with your kids is try to teach them well. Teach them right from wrong. Teach them to make wise decisions. Teach them to be good people.

And, even if you've done all of that, you still might end up disappointed. They still might eat their toast the wrong way.

I noticed it the other day with Thing 3 (our 19 month-old daughter.) She was eating a piece of toast, and she ate the middle out of the bread, leaving the entire crust intact. I was so disappointed and heartbroken. She's one of those people. It was a very sad day.

There is a gaping hole in the middle of her toast!

She's not alone. Her six year-old brother, Thing 2, does the same thing. And sometimes, he's even worse. He's constantly leaving the crust uneaten on his toast, sandwiches, or pizza. But, quite often I'll even come across a piece of toast he's "eaten" to find that all he has done is lick the jam off of the bread! It's horrifying!

There is, of course, a correct way to eat toast and sandwiches. It's the way I eat them. I eat all the way around the outside, eating the crust first, so that the best part, the crust-less middle innards, is the last thing I eat. Why do I do this? Isn't it obvious? I save the best part for last!

I eat the bread crust first. I eat the pizza crust first. And, when I eat a Reese's Peanut Butter Egg, one of the finest forms of food ever to be mass produced, I nibble around all of the chocolate edge, leaving the highlight, the peanut buttery middle, as my last bite! Why would anyone eat any other way?

Thing 1, my eight year-old daughter, eats things the same way I do. (She is a very smart girl.)

So, Thing 1 and I do things the right way, while Thing 2 and Thing 3 do it wrong. It's a balance between good and evil. But then I thought, wait, what about The Wife? I wasn't sure where she stood on this weighty, important issue. I had never seen her eat the crust first, nor had I seen her eat the middle out of her toast, although I had on occasion seen her eat up to, then discard, the crust of her pizza.

I asked her to find out which strategy she preferred. To my dismay, she aligned herself with the middle-first/crust-last people. She said the reason I had never seen her eat middle first is because she always cuts her toast or sandwiches in half diagonally so that her first bite can be from the middle.

She explained her philosophy to me. She eats the middle first so that she always eats the best part in case she gets full. She doesn't want to get full on the crust, then not have enough room to eat the best part, the middle.

It seems like a reasonable philosophy. But, I'm a waste not/want not kind of guy. I know I'm not going to be wasting the crust; I'm going to eat everything. As such, I want to save the best bite for last.

So, for now, in our family the middle-first people have the majority by the count of 3-2. It's all going to depend on the baby, Thing 4. He is still less than two months old, so he has yet to enjoy his first piece of toast or his first sandwich.

I can only hope that he'll be a crust-first jedi. (There must be balance in the force.)