The 3yo is the eater the 9yo used to be, to a large extent. He eats almost everything you serve him — all food groups. This time around, I simply know better than to congratulate myself on that. We’ll see what the next few years bring.

But the problem with the 3yo is something I have YET to encounter with his older sister. He has a truly frightening ability: He can tell from the other end of the house, through walls even, when someone else is eating. It doesn’t matter how small the morsel or how fast you chew. If you put something in your mouth, he knows, tells everyone else, and wants some himself.

Now actually, I was much more like this as a child than I was like the 9yo. At least, in my memory. I know I went through some picky stages, but I don’t remember that being my overriding food personality. But the food radar on the 3yo is really impressive. At times I’ve been worried at how much of a social eater he is — while I certainly view eating as a largely social experience [would I spend so much time sharing my thoughts on it with you if not?], I don’t want to train my kids to think that you should eat even when you’re not hungry. At the same time, the 3yo is so skinny there’s obviously no cause for worry at this point, and he does refuse food if he’s not hungry. So I really don’t worry.

But I do get really annoyed. Late this afternoon while all the tornado warnings were going on, I was watching the weather on TV and working in the kitchen to put some casseroles in the freezer. I’m trying to get ahead a bit for the summer when the baby is born. During the time it took me to put 3 casseroles together and freeze them, including making marinara sauce from scratch for one of them, I put two things in my mouth: One fun-size Snickers, and 1 tortilla chip. Despite his paying no attention whatsoever to me the rest of the afternoon, the minute those two items hit my mouth, the 3yo appeared out of nowhere with the same question: “Whatcha eating? I want some.” There’s no way the child was hungry. He’d just had a large snack not an hour before.

I actually saw the only false positive I’ve ever noticed on his food radar today, as well. I was picking up some of the crinkly, plastic, recyclable packaging I’d emptied when I started cleaning up and SHOOM! the 3yo appeared. “Whatcha eating? I want some.” I guess what I take from that is that I eat too many things that come in crinkly packaging, but I promise you his radar also works on completely silent food.

The really funny thing is that after being refused the second, late-afternoon snack he wanted, he professed not to be hungry at dinnertime. A problem quickly but inadvertently solved — five minutes later I had to tell him that boys who didn’t eat any dinner certainly didn’t get to share a peanut-butter cup with their moms after dinner.* Guess who actually was hungry after all?

*Just to be clear, we do not have the clean plate club at this house. I have never used the “clean your plate or no dessert” rule. I think that teaches bad habits, too. [Obsess about food much, do we?] But you do have to eat at least some dinner if you want dessert in my house, just on general nutritional principles. We eat grow food before fun food.