mrissa | Bad eater.

One of the first pieces of praise a baby gets in my family is, "Oh, she's a good eater." It's a matter-of-fact tidbit, a subset of "an easy baby": easy babies are good-natured, they sleep well, they are often alert enough to pay attention to passing aunties (always gratifying to the said aunties), and they are good eaters.

I have recently noticed that I am just not a good eater.

It's not that I don't like food. It's that actually eating it is not that important to me because of the smells. For example, I just put a pan of bars in the oven, and I didn't even want to lick the batter, because it had taken me slightly longer than usual to make the batter (puply interference), and that was just enough additional time smelling the stuff that I didn't want to eat it. It feels like I've already had about three bars because of the smells, and in fact I've had nothing. And I need to eat lunch at some point, because the hypoglycemia will kick in and I will fall over. And also because people need to eat, generally, and I am a people. I'm not trying to lose weight -- it's not like that. It's just that the smells get so overwhelming.

The other hard bit, besides the smells, is coming up with things I want to eat. This is much easier with other people to deal with: lunch will be a bagel, because I could pick up bagels for

timprov and

markgritter and at that point it was just as easy to pick one up for myself. Dinners are generally pretty easy, because they involve other people most of the time, and so I cook for them and eat incidentally. I like too much stuff. It's hard to figure out which bit to grab next. Last week I went downstairs for lunch by myself and had a handful of nuts, some blueberries, and half a grapefruit. And I was ready to be done -- wanted to be done. But I knew that it would not hold me for the rest of the afternoon, so I had to come up with something else in addition to all that. The grapefruit smelled almost peppery. It was overwhelming by itself. Overwhelmingly good, but I just wanted to be done and keep the grapefruit smell for awhile.

I'm not really sure how to do this, except continue to eat with other people because I want to spoil them. But it's a bit frustrating.