Coco woke up this morning and the first thing she said is:

It’s sugar day!

Her French class is planning to make crepes. Each child needed to bring their filling of choice. I tried offering the healthier choices, and she wrinkled her nose at me.

Jelly? Honey? Maple Syrup?

I never buy white sugar. Though I cave into the bags of candy she gets from parties and let her store them in a little shelf in the refrigerator and pick a few out here and there. I refuse to buy white sugar. It’s my last stand against the wild winds of the sweets world. Coco knew we had a bag in the refrigerator left over from making the bloody fingers for Halloween. I even caught her a few times opening the door and just checking to see if it was still there.

My nannies have to bring their own. I provide all their food and even buy them bread when I don’t eat it the stuff. Gives me a stomach ache and is the one product that will simply reform in the shape of cinnamon toast and apply itself directly to my outer thighs.

Coco sat at the breakfast table and sprinkled two huge helpings of tapa dulce - it’s sugar in the raw form and actually has a few minerals left in it unlike white sugar, which has been cooked 37 times and all nutritional value thus shot to hell - over the “all-natural” millet rice cereal. Who can blame her? The cereal tastes like the box it came in.

She bounced to the kitchen and asked:

Where’s the sugar? Not the brown sugar - the white sugar.

I had put it in a little plastic container and then wrapped it in sugar. Ants will find it in three minutes if they sniff even the smallest openings. As I put it in her backpack, I do believe I saw Coco drool, just a bit, like a dog sitting at the feet of someone who’s just flipped them a charred burger and hopes for more.

I’m not sure if I’ve lost or won this sugar battle. One of Coco’s favorite snacks when she was little was avocado/date bocas. I’d cut avocados, which are really inexpensive in Costa Rica, and add a slice of date on top and spike them onto a toothpick. She loved it. Now she hates avocados and tolerates dates.

One day our kids will go off and eat any-old-darned thing they please. I was just remembering a few late college evenings when my friends and I would whip up batches of cheese kurds. Deep fried of course. My hope is she’ll get off to a bit better start than me and when she’s about to fry up her second batch of those greasy blobs of lactose, she just might have an apple instead.