the food runner

amelia has come down the stairs twice now in the past 30 minutes. both times with an empty little green snack bowl in hand. both times she smiles at me with this glowing, 4-teeth-missing grin, a sly smile. she tiptoes around the hallway & then pushing her hands behind her back, not so gracefully glides into the kitchen. she begins walking on her tiptoes once she sees the white cheddar cheeseball puffs on the counter (well, you can't miss this container b/c it's enormous. yes, sue & bruce, this is still from christmas! but that's mostly b/c we put them in the pantry  & lost sight of them until now. good thing? they're *gluten free!* so the girls & i have been eating them like mad today).

the second time i helped amelia up the stairs with a fresh bowl of cheddar -corn puffs, i followed her just to see where she would go with such a large bowl of puffs (this was the 3rd i'd given her, if you count her snack 45 minutes earlier). so i hid on the stairs & peeked around the corner. she actually turned around to see if i was watching! i ducked. then she went into the playroom, sat right beside her sister, handed the bowl to adeline, who then dumped the entire lot of puffs into her own bowl! thief! that was my first thought. then it hit me: i'd been suckered by adeline. she sent down her wee toddler sister, who she knows i won't refuse a 3rd bowl of totally unhealthy snackishness. i will refuse adeline based on how many push ups & crunches & laps around the cul-du-sac she'd done that day (totally kidding! i would refuse her based on us trying to get adeline to eat dinner once in awhile, hence not giving her a snack after 4 or 4:30).

& to be fair, adeline did give 3, yes only 3, cheddar puffs to amelia (who seemed quite happy to even have those 3) & poor griswold off on the side didn't get any! anyway, this is just how it goes i guess. i need to be on my toes a bit more for other manipulative-child tricks that my preschooler learns from school (or maybe she learned this from caillou? then again, i think she could think of this herself).

so i just asked adeline, who ran down the steps shouting, mommy! it's over, it's over (talking about caillou...which is the reason why they're upstairs & i'm down here. i do *not* like caillou.) so yea, i asked adeline if she sent her sister down to get more cheese puffs for her. she blushed, looked around, smiled & said "yyynoooooo". ha! caught!