Not All Sweetness

So, Meera Grace is probably about as sweet as can be. She turns heads everywhere she goes with her ridiculously-cute-ness. But she is not without her sass. And she can hold her own with her big brothers. Seriously. This girl is a crazy mixture of sticky-sweet with a seriously-strong-soul-of-her-own. Upon first glance, her brothers dominate every scene. But anyone who’s looking beneath the surface at all sees the strength of Meera in every picture. She is a force, in her own right. Just a totally different type of force than the dynamic duo of K & O. Not better or worse, just different. And equally noteworthy. For example…

Tonight at dinner, while the rest of us were carrying on a loud and lively conversation (typical dinner at our house), Meera sat quietly doing her own thing at the head of the table. (Sidenote: since she was about 18 months old, she’s been demanding to sit at the head of the table, with K & O on either side of her. That has been her place at the table for the past year or so, maybe longer.) Anyway… as is the norm, we all sort of carried on with our very animated chit-chat, while Meera basically flew under the radar. We all sort of noticed what she was doing, but didn’t really do anything about it. At one point Owen did say, “I’m just ignoring her. We’re all just ignoring bad behavior, right?” I looked over at her and then said, “Yes, let’s just ignore it.” What she was doing was taking small bits of food off her plate, one by one, and carefully placing them in her glass of water. And then, using her fork, she was very purposefully stirring it all up. We were having blackened tilapia, rice pilaf, and a veggie sauté (zucchini and yellow squash, snow peas, cherry tomatoes, Vidalia onions). Meera’s little mixture was absolutely gross. Finally, none of us could take it any longer. She was just blatantly getting away with something totally naughty (as defined by our family). So, we stopped our conversation and we all turned our attention to her. There were lots of “that’s disgusting!”’s and “Meeeeeera!”’s and “ewwwwwww! nasty!”’s coming from the four of us. I said, “Well, really, it is just the same thing that we’re all eating, only stirred together with water.” And then, with very little prompting from us, Meera happily lifted the glass of grossness to her lips and took a sip. She then handed it to Owen, who gladly drank some too. She then handed it to Kyle, who tentatively tasted it and proceeded to run to the kitchen sink to spit it out. Braydon and I both graciously declined the offer to taste it, much to Meera’s disappointment. She then went on to eat a big bowl of blueberry yogurt with sliced bananas, a dinner she seemed to much prefer over the first.

Meera Grace. Not all sweetness.