Isabella is a creature of habit, that’s for sure. (WARNING! Inbound detour!) Taking a hard right just as the gate swings open, I wonder why the “creature of habit” expression uses the word “creature”? If it always refers to people, why not just say “person of habit”? Or going up the tree one step to get “animal of habit”? Maybe that just doesn’t sound as good; I don’t know. “Creature” just seems so gruesome. In any case, I do know that it makes me feel a bit uneasy to describe my daughter, even just metaphorically, as some… being/lifeforce/entity/thing that came out of the Black Lagoon with some OCD issues.

Anyway, back on track, Isabella picks her favorite things and then sticks with them. She stays with them for a long time, reading/watching/playing them, talking about them, and in general obsessing over them constantly. If she’s in a Dora phase, her answer to the question, “Do you want milk?” might be “Boots likes to play in milk” or “I want to ride a cow like Dora” or even “Boots plays naked, but with boots on.” She likes to give the therapists something meaty to work on.

Well, gingerbread is “in” these days. Because of this, all gingerbread books in our house are in high demand, like “The Gingerbread Man,” “The Gingerbread Boy,” “The Gingerbread Girl,” and “The Gingerbread Cowboy.” (spoiler alert!) The Man gets eaten by a fox faking hearing loss, the Boy gets eaten in the traditional way by riding the fox’s back across the river, the Girl almost gets eaten but uses a red licorice whip from her hair to tie the fox’s muzzle shut and thus domesticate it, and the Cowboy gets eaten in almost the traditional way (e.g. a Coyote instead of a Fox gets him). Why does the girl go free? Seems sexist to me.

I was surprised that Isabella was not disturbed at all when the gingerbread males were eaten (not the female, though, because as you may remember, she got off scot free). In fact, her favorite page was from the Boy book in which it describes, in gory detail, how the Boy is bitten in half, then in quarters, then is swallowed. This is the same Boy who was just running and jumping and singing and overall having a pretty jolly time of it. To top it off, the picture shows the fox’s mouth open wide, pointed to the sky, his neck bulging with the squirming body of his still writhing prey, and a sad gingerbread boy’s face peering out as he’s eaten alive. I can’t look at the picture when I read it. It freaks me out.

In any case, the gingerbread phase may last a few more weeks, then we’ll be into something else, like maybe Monster Munchies or The Wonder Pets. We’re already past “Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog!”, so that one is probably out for a while. On the other hand, she ate two hot dogs last night, but that might not be related.

She comes by this habitualness naturally, though. I have eaten oatmeal five days a week for, oh, maybe a couple of years. Before that, I had the same type of cereal every morning for even longer. My mom is the same way, but in turbo. Therefore, this tendency might be more Usey and XXX (MATT EDITORIAL COMMENT: my mom’s maiden name was omitted here so you can’t get into my bank account) than Asperger. So Isabella may have this for a long time. Like maybe forever.