The strawberry diet

Anya has always hitherto been a complete omnivore. Pretty much anything we gave her, she would inhale indiscriminatingly before bouncing off to work down the calories with an intense stair-climbing workout.

But these things start to change with toddlerhood. She's not picky yet, but she's starting to rank her foodstuffs a bit. And guess what? Sweet stuff comes top.

We've been fairly sparing of the sweet things we've given her so far. She first tasted ice-cream two weeks ago, when we were having an early dinner with our friends David and Kathy and their nearly-three-year-old Ellen. After a brief moment of confusion, the glucose started to work its magic on her synapses and she started doing her impression of a boa constrictor dislocating its jaw to swallow a pig.

Obviously we're wary of that getting out of hand, but we give her fruit all the time. She can finish off a tangerine in a couple of minutes, eat half a pear without pausing for breath, chomp an apple into sauce within seconds. But most of all, she loves strawberries.

This morning she woke up before six, so I gave her a bottle in an attempt to get her back to sleep. Sometimes this works. Not this morning, though: 20 minutes later I was up and giving her the usual breakfast of weet-bix with peach puree. Feeding her breakfast in these circumstances can be tough, because she's already full of milk; after about half-a-dozen spoonfuls, she was getting bored.

Anyway, I tried out what I thought was a clever daddy strategy: I cut up a strawberry into tiny bits and strewed it over the weet-bix. At first, she allowed this into her mouth, but after a few minutes of bulldog-chewing-on-a-wasp facial gymnastics she gobbed the weet-bix down her front, happily pronounced the result "nummets!" (yummy) and went reaching for more bits of strawberry. Reader, I'll admit: after a while, I just gave up and just let her eat the rest of it. I'm telling myself that I'll have plenty of time to try to get the better of these food battles; but Anya's clearly got herself an early lead.