Tuppence Per Each Bag

I’ve been trying to eat well lately. In theory I’ve been trying to eat well all my life, minus college. In practice I’ve been getting progressively better for the past 5-10 years. I’ve very recently turned to a hard-core, stop-eating-anything-that-doesn’t-taste-like-a-literal-nutrient way of eating.

I’m struggling with perplexing health problems and if you have perplexing health problems, eventually you turn to examining your diet and when you examine your diet, you find that if it tastes good, there are at least ten people who live on the internet who will tell you that what you’re eating is causing your specific problem.

I don’t listen to those ten people because they obviously hate brownies.

However, last week my naturopath told me that I should consider severely limiting my grains. Also, my “random thoughts that come into my head right after I finish praying” told me I should severely limit my sugar intake.

Blech.

So I’m trying to eat like a good girl, I am. Lean meats and vegetables, baby!

But there are days when Doritos must be imbibed. So, I was having one of those days but I was trying to have it Drops-of-Awesomely, focusing on the fact that I only bought the supersized personal-sized 50% more bag, instead of the supersized FAMILY-sized 50% more bag. I planned to enjoy every morsel.

Then Wanda walked in. She had many questions, questions about what I was eating, about why she was not also eating it, about, please please, could she please eat it.

So I shared.

Begrudgingly.

If I was going to unlimit my grains, I wanted to unlimit them all the way down.

But she had cuteness on her side and I really shouldn’t have been eating that much grain, much less that much grain coated in nuclear cheese dust. I should be feeding it to my sweet, growing child person.

She started plowing through the chips faster than I would have thought possible. She’d grab one, say, “Thanks,” and leave the room. Two seconds later she’d be back for more. With increasing dog-protecting-his-bone-ish-ness, I handed them to her. Grrrr….

We made short work of the bag and I continued my quest to eat things that are green and crunchy and capable of making me feel smug and self-satisfied when I notice them hanging around like a lump in my stomach and later coming out in Dr. Oz approved luscious deposits.

But, as I went outside later to pick up my kids from the bus, what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a mother lode of Doritos all over the porch and front walk.

“Look!” Wanda grinned, “I’m feeding ALL the birdies!”

It was obvious from the sheer number of slimy glowing orange chips that the birdies had absolutely zero interest, or they assumed that something the color of a construction cone was inedible, from previous painful personal experience.

So I smiled and congratulated her on her good deed-ery, sighing at all the lost cheesy goodness. And when she wasn’t looking, I threw them over the fence into the decaying bamboo forest section of my crazy-sauce back yard. I don’t know what goes on back there but we have found animal bones. And broken clay pots circa AD 1985.

Now all that’s left to do is put on all my Newsies-colored dresses and skirts in multiple layers, tease my hair like a crazy rock star homeless person and start singing on my front porch steps. “Feed the microscopic organisms in the decaying bamboo forest section of my crazy-sauce back yard. Tuppence per each bag.”

You know you’d pay money to see that. Way more fun than giving your coin to those mean old guys at the bank, right?