In my family we have a favorite story about my brother, then age twoish, getting caught by my friend Crystal eating her cat’s food. Actually, she didn’t catch him eating; she caught him kneeling next to the cat’s food dish spitting something out onto the floor. Which, of course, she could only deduce to be cat food.

When Crystal inquired about it, Greg scrunched up his nose in an expression of distaste and replied, “That cereal was yucky.”

Since the Burt Squirt became mobile, various family members have laughingly warned me to keep our cat’s food dish out of his reach. Usually when he’s crawling or toddling about I do, but today the Burt Squirt turned on the stealth and managed to try the yucky cereal on the sly.

Only he didn’t seem to think it was very yucky.

Of course it happened because I was distracted–ironically, with cooking the Burt Squirt’s dinner. Obviously I wasn’t serving dinner quickly enough, because when I turned around, there was the Burt Squirt, sitting in the kitchen with his legs splayed out, Dorrie’s food dish between them. One pudgy hand hand fisted as many dry chicken pellets as the stubby fingers could close around; the other waved winsomely at me.

His little mouth, still with only the four front teeth in it, was chewing.

And it would have continued to do so, judging from the way his nose was not scrunched up in an expression of distaste, had I not gone fishing for one, two, and a half pieces of cat food. There might have been more–probably there was at least another half a piece–but the Burt Squirt wriggled away before I could plumb the depths of his mouth for the rest of his quarry. Goodness only knows how much he consumed before I saw him doing it.

I’m not worried, especially since just the other day I saw a TV ad for an expensive brand of cat food that slagged off all the commercial brands for being made mainly of corn. If corn’s good enough for my cat, it’s good enough for my kid! That might be a backwards philosophy, but I’ll keep it in mind in the dog days of summer when he starts catching and eating the baby geckos that find their way into the house.