Green Leaf Report

*The title is meant to be sung to the Barney tune of “If Raindrops were Gumdrops.”

Every night my son and I share a bowl of ice cream, and I’ve noticed a parallel between my household’s ice cream interaction and the global economic demand and supply of oil. In this story:

• I will represent the American economy. I’m generally fairly stable in size, though I have recently retracted due to the loss of some baby weight.
• My oversized, active toddler son will represent the fast growing Chinese and Indian economies. As I putter around the house, he literally runs circles around me and I can almost see him growing taller.
• My daughter will represent the other developing economies from around the world. She’s too young for ice cream, but she watches us with a look in her eyes that says to me, “Just wait, soon I will be eating your ice cream also. Mwa ha ha.”
• My husband represents OPEC. Sweetheart that he is, he prepares the bowl of ice cream for my son and I nightly, though he always comments on our addiction to ice cream, and how he’s never seen anyone eat so much ice cream so quickly.

Before we eat our nightly bowl of ice cream, my son gets so excited that he will sit pretty much in one place for almost a few minutes in a row. As we happily share the bowl, he never seems to notice that I eat about two bites for every one bite he takes. His happy demeanor starts to shift as we approach the bottom of the bowl, however — when he realizes there’s only one bite left, his face always shifts to an angry expression, and he pushes me on the shoulder. Because I’m a caring mom, and in an attempt to avoid a tantrum, I always spoon feed him the last bite. He doesn’t have a lot of memory or confidence in my sharing abilities, however – last night as I was scraping up that last bite and paying more attention to the ice cream than to him, he smacked me in the forehead with his spoon. I now have a bruise: a physical reminder of the challenges of balancing conflicting demands.

I’ve been eating my nightly bowl of ice cream since I was a child. Like so many Americans, I never expected there to be any constraints on the amount of ice cream available to me. As my household has grown and changed, however, I can no longer eat any food without my toddler’s fingers coming onto my plate- it doesn’t matter if he has his own plate, or if he’s already eaten. He wants mine also. This change in demand is shocking and difficult to adjust to- I shudder to imagine life when he’s a teenager- perhaps the ice cream will be gone before we get to the fridge. Horrors!