Creme de la Creme

For a long time, and thank God, Alex has been eating yogurt. He likes the pink Dannon Le Cremes, which seem to be raspberry or strawberry. As long as they’re pink there’s no difference to Alex and none to me, either, because I hate yogurt.

I hate the look of it, the feel of it, the smell of it, and presumably I’d hate the taste of it. Slick, cold, smelling vaguely of something spoiled. Which it isn’t, of course, at least as far as nutrition is concerned, and I hate myself for hating it, because I know it’s fabulous for you and about the most good-for-you bang for the buck you’re going to find in your local dairy case.

Image: Walmart

Can’t stand it. So for a long time too I’ve assisted Alex in eating it. “Alex!” I’d call. “Yogurt!”

He’s been eating yogurt since we had him in a highchair on feeding therapies, fresh home at age 1 from the hospital. At that time, anything good was gold if it slid past slim Alex’s lips. (”Yogurt!?” wondered my big brother, a creature of the diet-conscious advertising of the 197os. “If you want him to gain weight, why do you have him eat yogurt?” Fine, bro. You try to feed him…).

In recent years, school and teachers got him back onto yogurt — only Le Creme, in the same way he’ll only eat Hebrew National hot dogs, unchallenged winners of taste test after taste test — and soon they were claiming he was eating it on his own. No smears on the table, no icky pink spots on pants’ legs, no wiping up that gives dad the willies.

So we’ve tried it at home. “Alex! Yogurt!” Sometimes he comes to the table with his hands over his mouth, but that’s a crack. Sit him down and scoop in the first spoonful and he opens like a steamed clam. “Alex, you eat it yourself now.” Take that step toward independence and, like so many such steps, spare your father something in the process.

A few minutes later and the container is almost scraped bare. I scrape together the last spoonful, and another quarter of a $2.99 bargain in Alex’s eating is ready for the rinse and the recyling bin. No muss and no fuss. Now we just need to get him to put them away from the grocery bags.