Bon Appetit!

When seafood comes into season, my wife's internal radar goes off.  She'll hear a snippet of conversation where someone will say, "I found crawfish for sale at $4.99/lb," and be off to the races.  Scallops, lobster, crab, crawfish, and salmon all get her blood pumping.  So, when she heard a friend of hers say she got a good deal on crawfish at our local fish house, she was at the market the next day.

When we sat down to eat the crawfish, it was already cracked.  Tracy knows I don't like to work too hard for food (I'm lame, I know), and so she spent the early part of the evening cracking her way through ten pounds of crawfish.

Shea, resisting dinner as has become her new custom, toddled around the kitchen and living room playing Billy Bop, a new game she'd invented.  It's basically "how long can you keep the balloon up in the air," but when compared to a name like Billy Bop, who can compete?

"Shea, dinner."

"I don't want dinner."

"Shea.  We said it was time for dinner."  You have to love the parental "we", don't you?

"Come play."

"Honey, I've told you twice.  Now come up for dinner.  We're having seafood."

Tracy's love for seafood is apparently genetic because Shea has received the gene.  She loves it all as much as her mommy does. 

"Are we having crab?"

"Kind of.  It's crawfish, or crawdads.  Now, come on and get up to the table."

Shea dropped her balloon and scooted up into her chair.  Tracy set the plate in front of her and you could see her little eyes scanning the plate.  The red and white flesh of the crawfish is similar to crab and the presentation of a lump of cracked meat on her plate was the same as well. 

"Are you sure this isn't crab?" she asked as she stuffed a claw into her mouth and started chewing.  She let out a little groan of delight, mmm.

As Tracy and I finished dishing up our own plates and made our way to the table, Shea was intently eating her dinner.  At one point she dropped a piece of crawfish and she pointed her little hand to the ground with her eyebrows wrinkled up in anxiety.  I got it for her and she popped it into her mouth.  (C'mon, folks, three second rule totally applies)

Digging her little hands back into the stack of claws on her plate, she lifted one up and said, "Bon Appetit!" with the straightest of faces.  Tracy and I are not prone to using the phrase at all, so the moment was instantly hysterical.  Our burgeoning little foodie!

My life used to seem like an endless quest for entertainments, but that appears to have come to an end.  Now, all I need to do is sit down at the dinner table and wait.  Bon Appetit!