First you get the granola bars, then you get the knife...

Some time ago, I (Chris) picked up a box of granola bars that looked relatively healthy. In retrospect, some of that was laziness, as I saw the word "organic" on the box and figured, "Great, these are better than what I usually eat, and probably decent for Sean." They didn't have nuts, the filling and outer part each seemed relatively soft and chewable for toddler teeth, and one day I gave Sean a bite because I'd grabbed one for a snack for myself but he'd noticed I was eating in front of him. And I thought little of it beyond, "Hm, he liked that."

Some days and a few bars later, I began to wonder why Sean was so excited by the prospect of getting another granola bar, and I glanced at the label more attentively. Turns out that only some of the ingredients - and arguably not the more important ones - were organic; more importantly, there were other things that we didn't need to be giving Sean so frequently, so we stopped then and there.

But Sean hasn't forgotten. Even though it's been at least a couple months since his last granola bar, he has not forgotten where we kept them, or that we used to have them, or the color of the wrapper. So periodically he will, out of the blue, ask, "Purple?" and we (well, apparently only me, since Sean doesn't associate them with Merrie, since she didn't get suckered into buying the bars and giving them to Sean so blithely) have to explain that we know what he's asking for, but we just don't have any, so he can't have one.

This is followed, 49 times out of 50, by Sean's fallback snack query: "Cracker?"

It's rather interesting to think that Sean is consciously, deliberately negotiating with us ("Look, you slackers, you don't have my purple bars, so why don't you give me a cracker?").

And it's quite possible that he's learned how to use it as a way to change the subject . For example, this morning, we'd had the dishwasher down and he'd been playing with it a bit (though not on the scale of Wednesday's sculpture), and he walked out of the kitchen with a knife in his hand while I was on the phone with Merrie.

Which led to my putting the phone down, holding the knife, and explaining that we couldn't have him doing anything with the knives, because it wasn't safe.

I'm pretty sure that Sean grasped the seriousness of the situation... mainly because he tried to change the subject repeatedly, by interrupting to ask, "Purple?" and then when I kept talking about knives and safety, "Cracker?"