This evening, Kaia had a decent dinner, and oddly, she rejected any fruit we offered her at the end. She didn’t want blueberries or mandarins that we suggested. So we cleaned her up and let her play a bit before bedtime. As I was washing some dishes at the sink, Kaia kept pointing at the fruit bowl on the counter, specifically calling out the bananas on it. “Banana! Banana!” she yelled a few times.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to give it to her. The last several times she asked to eat a banana and I opened them for her, she refused to take even a single bite. But this time, I decided to just hand her the banana whole and see what she would do. Well, one minute later, she had bitten through the banana peel into the flesh and was chewing away at the entire fruit. A fat bite of the peel was sitting on my kitchen floor, and she happily chomped away at the whole banana, completely unaware of how strange this behavior actually was.

Well, I guess that was a sign that she really did want to eat the banana. So I went ahead and peeled it and let her eat it, holding the banana from the base peel. In the end, it was quite miraculous: she’d actually eaten about 90 percent of the entire banana, which was a decent size. She left me about one bite that she didn’t want anymore and handed it back.

This reminded me of the time about one year ago when she was a young toddler/big baby, and she asked for a mandarin, but I was multitasking and trying to get something else cleaned. So I had handed her the mandarin whole and asked her to wait until I finished cleaning something on the counter. Two minutes later, she had chewed through the mandarin skin and gotten to the segments. I took a picture of the fruit looking totally mauled, like it was attacked by an animal. It would serve as a way to remember how cute my baby was when she didn’t want to wait for me to peel her fruit.