My cupcake

instead of staying up late blogging, I've been staying up late the past couple of nights making a Halloween costume.

Mind you, I have a hand-me-down lion costume, a new bee costume from my mother-in-law, and a mermaid costume that I bought recently at a yard sale. But no, my daughter has her own ideas. She's barely two, but she has decided, definitively, that she wants to be a cupcake. Over the weeks since this idea formed in her head - perhaps after the four cupcakes she ate on her own birthday - it has become more elaborate; it's now a bear cupcake.

Now, I don't get offended or feel cravings, as you might think, when I see her eat cupcakes or talk about them. Cupcakes long ago ceased to be food to me. Oh, I have a sweet tooth, all right; I find a way to eat something chocolate almost daily. But in the early years, the traditional diabetes diet trained me to think of such delicacies as rare treats. Even with the pump - which allowed me a lot of freedom relative to before - I still can't manage the sweetness of most cupcake frostings (maybe the cupcake alone, but what's the fun of that?) Top that off with the problem with wheat, and it's just not worth it.

I do vaguely wonder whether it's a good thing for my daughter to consume so many sweets at once. I know that eating sugar doesn't cause type 1 diabetes (some misguided comments from strangers to the contrary). But I an still sensitive to how bad sugar is for health, even for a nondiabetic. I do try to ensure my daughter eats a healthy diet most of the time. And I like to let her enjoy the freedom that I don't have.

It certainly was strange when my daughter began eating real food instead of baby mush. It felt like I myself was cheating when I starting feeding her bread, and when she ate her first piece of cake. I had to work hard to remember what "normal" people eat, and I had to reassure myself that it was okay for her to eat, say, pasta. Oddly, she turns out not to like pasta much, but she does like crackers, and most definitely cupcakes! She doesn't like red meat yet, and I'm happy not to push it. She gets plenty of protein, and I've often thought that, if my diet weren't already so restricted in other ways, I might have become vegetarian (probably for humane reasons as much as for health).