I live with at least two monsters. I am married to one monster, and I birthed the other. Their monstrosity is most evident when they are eating, a task that typically leaves onlookers bamboozled and slack-jawed. Husband Monster Luke's favorite thing to eat is a whole roasted chicken from the grocery store. About four seconds after arriving home with prized, newly-purchased chicken, Luke will plop it on the counter, still cocooned in the plastic bag, and eat it straight out of the container with his bare hands, shoveling one pile of chicken flesh after another into his mouth at astonishing speed. It's grotesque (bah, there’s chicken in his beard!) yet awe-inspiring (look at the determination in this man’s eyes!). Recently, he bought one of these roasted chickens for dinner, but since I was heading out the door for a girls' night, he quickly discovered that it's difficult to double fist chicken flesh with two screaming toddlers at one's feet. Much to his dismay, he had to surrender the completion of the chicken for another time. 

The next day, as he microwaved the remaining chicken, I noticed that he was standing about two inches from the microwave, watching it sizzle for a bit longer then seemed necessary, with a look in his eyes that I can only compare to the frizzy, maniacal, bloodthirsty intensity of Mel Gibson in that hatchet scene in The Patriot. I'm standing next to him, coincidentally telling him a story about our son’s greedy speed-eating of Teddy Grahams, when the microwave dinged. With lightning fast reflexes, Luke grabbed the piping hot plate right out of the microwave and shoveled the smoking chicken right into his mouth even though it was basically on fire. “You are an absolute monster!” I screamed at him in horror. “How is that not burning off all of your taste buds and searing your throat?!” He just shrugged and left the room as I watched in wide-eyed disbelief. Oh Benjamin Martin, you are quite the Revolutionary hero.

I have seen him do this kind of thing before. I remember carefully picking out a cupcake for him at a favorite local bakery, and I brought it home, excited to give it to him, and he popped the whole thing in his mouth and swallowed it down in one gulp. “What flavor was it?!” I screamed. “You don’t even know!”  He shrugged. “Chocolate?” He’s the kind of guy who won't cut a slice of pie and put it on a plate like a regular person, but instead while standing over the counter, he hovers over the pie entirety wielding a fork like a under-qualified surgeon’s scalpel and hollows out the middle. This ensures two things: no one else will get a decent slice, and he looks like an absolute savage. Oh humanity.

Our son is a carbon copy of my husband in terms of his eating habits. In fact, you would be wise to not mention “oatmeal” in his presence. It’s the toddler equivalent of screaming “Bomb!” in an airport. The second the word leaves your mouth he will flatten you like a highly trained security team, and you will regret it for the rest of your days. Oatmeal is the love of his life. He starts screaming for his morning bowl (“OHMAAAA!!!!”) before we're half way down the stairs, which is approximately five minutes after he’s woken up, so I can only assume that’s how long it takes him each morning to remember the precious nectar exists. He loses his mind during the 20 seconds it takes to heat up the bowl, and then once the oatmeal is finally in his possession, he’ll shove his pudgy hands into it with wild abandon, cramming handfuls into his adorable circle face with astonishing speed. Of course, this guarantees that he always smells like maple, and it's just about the best thing I could've imagined, and this reminds me to tell you that you’ll want to make sure that he always has maple-flavored oatmeal unless you want his head to turn all the way around and flames to shoot out of his eyes. But as long as it’s the maple kind, Greer can gulp down his first bowl in record speed, and yes, I said first because each morning, he has TWO BOWLS, and though he demands three, I HAVE DRAWN THE LINE AT TWO BECAUSE WE NEED SOME STANDARDS. He yells at me between bowls, and he yells at me after the second bowl, but I do earn quite a bit of respect from him when I can scrape the empty bowl and provide one extra spoonful. 

Beyond his oatmeal problems, Baby Monster Greer regularly sobs for more food from a mouth that is notably and ironically already crammed with food. So for example, if you gave him a donut hole, he's content as long as he's looking at it in his hand, but the second he pops the donut hole in his mouth, devastation reigns because there’s no donut hole on deck, and this likely means the whole world is ending. Obviously Sunday mornings are a doozy, since donut holes, like the Holy Spirit, fill any Baptist church worth its salt. Both of my kids have this habit of standing next to the donut table and looking sad, until a sweet bystander hands them a donut, unaware that they’ve just fallen victim to a sophisticated donut heist. I’ve watched it happen from afar about four zillion times. It’s very Oliver-esque, and sometimes I feel tempted to dress them like impoverished British street urchins just to see how many donuts we could swindle. In fact, when my daughter was younger, our church hosted a breakfast before church, and several different people approached me and told me they'd given Adelaide a whole donut. “I hope that's okay,” they said. And I said, “Well it is okay for her to have a donut, except that you're about the fifth person that's told me that. Does anyone know how many donuts my 18-month-old daughter has consumed?” My mom suggested I safety-pin a piece of paper on her dress that reads, “Please sign here if you’ve given me a donut.” I haven’t done this because I fear the truth. So I guess that means I’ve got three monsters on my hands, and maybe four if you consider the way I behave around Girl Scout cookies. If a box of Samoas even looks me in the eye, I completely black out and awaken, terrified, to an empty box and chocolate-covered hands, and my soul shudders. I should also add that my dad used to caution me at the dinner table, "Caroline, don't wolf it!" But I wolfed it. I always wolfed it.

Dear Jesus, bless this food, bless these monsters. Amen.