Muscrap

So it's kind of a long story how we started calling pork roast "muskrat," which then became "muskrap" in Monkey's vocabulary. It's all traceable to a pork tenderloin that I made that, in its finished state, looked a bit like it had a head and little legs and a tail. Matt peered into the pan and said, "I'm sure it's good, but that looks a lot like a muskrat." At dinner, Monkey was refusing to eat and Matt told her that she had to eat, and that it was muskrat, which was a delicacy and she would really like it if she tried it. She announced that she would not eat "muskrap." But then she tasted it and finished it all.

We had "muskrap" again last weekend. But, on leftover night, Monkey once again was refusing to eat it without a full complement of cranberry sauce. In fact, she announced that she would like simply to have the cranberry sauce. No muskrap was contemplated. Daddy told her, as he so often does, that everyone knows that you can't have cranberry without eating your muskrap. She refused. So he got out the cranberry sauce and said, "Okay, Monkey. Are you ready?" She peered at the cranberry sauce, leaned toward it from her high chair, and said, "I'm not ready for muskrap."

We did, in fact, get her to eat it. Quite a bit of it, actually. But it involved a healthy serving of cranberry sauce. In the process, Matt tried to feed her a piece of broccoli sans cranberry. We knew we'd done wrong when she announced, "The thing is, you have to feed me cranberry with the bockies."

I feel as if I'm talking to an 80-year-old trapped in tiny footy pajamas.