Wait 'Till He Tells The Kids at School About This One.

Although Tai is a typical pre-schooler when it comes to avoiding all green food, we are fortunate that he's not terribly picky and is not easily freaked out. He likes to try new things as long as they are protein. And he has a love of seafood that includes scallops, shrimp, crab, and lobster. On our recent trip to Maine, Tai devoured nearly an entire order of mussels and picked all the big chunks of lobster out of Minh's lobster roll.

So when it was time for the last dinner of the trip and we found ourselves at a restaurant that offered a kids meal of a whole (small) lobster and fries, we decided to go for it. Not wanting to waste money, we checked with him first. He was very excited about the idea of having a whole lobster on his plate.

Now, Tai knows full well what a whole lobster looks like. We often visit them in the tank at the supermarket. And he knows that they are in the tank so people can buy them, take them home, and cook them. This does not bother him, thankfully.

So Minh and I were not prepared for Tai's expression of confusion mixed with just a bit of horror when his meal arrived. Sadly, we didn't get a picture of that first moment, but we did capture his exclamation that, "They didn't take the legs off!" At first I wondered why he was so confused, when we told him it would be a whole lobster. But then I remembered that he's seen whole cooked turkeys and they look nothing like live turkeys. Same deal with chickens and ducks, right?


After the initial shock, he was eager to learn from his daddy how to pull the legs off and suck the meat out, crack open the claws, and dig out the tail meat. He proudly wore the bib, used the tiny plastic fork, and asked lots of questions. "What do we do with the eyes?" "What about the head?"

In the end, he ate about 2/3 of his little lobster and enjoyed every bite. He did so well that we got him a dessert too. Three bites into it I asked how it was and he said, "Mama, it's so good, I can't even tell you!" It was a fantastic end to a fun but exhausting trip.