cheese with your whine?

I think Andy is having a hard time adjusting to life with a little brother, having to share the spotlight and share the available parental attention. He's doing his best, but his emotions are running a tad high and they seem to have a hair trigger. He melts down quite easily. (More easily than normal, that is.)

Yesterday he asked for a banana. I was feeding Benji so I told him to go upstairs and pull a chair up to the counter and get his own banana. He's perfectly capable of doing this.

I heard a great deal of thudding and tromping and thonking, following by one big wham! on the kitchen floor. I knew this was the snowball which would set off the meltdown avalanche, and sure enough, he came down the stairs in tears.

"What's wrong Andy?" I asked him.

He could barely talk because he was focusing so much energy on his over-dramatic whining.

Finally I heard, "I dropped the greenie!"

"What?"

"I dropped the greenie Mommy!"

"The what?"

"The greenie!" And he threw himself down on the floor.

I put an irritated Benjamin down and went over to Andy and plucked him up off the floor. "What is a greenie, Andy?"

He answered, "That big green banana up in the kitchen."

We don't have any green bananas. They are all quite yellow and spotty and of a normal size. So I grabbed Benji and went upstairs to find the world's biggest zucchini on the kitchen floor, and zucchini guts all over the chair he'd used to retrieve it. In addition, there were three semi-peeled bananas smashed on the counter.

None of which he would touch. While I was cleaning up the banana mess he went back downstairs. I found him eating Nutter Butters.