Almond memories and what Squirrels eat

Reilly’s ability to recall minute details of her life is amazing. She consistently remembers people and events that have long since been filed away in my memory, and jogged to the front of my consciousness only by her prompting.

Shawn and I usually keep fresh nuts in the house. The most popular nut would be almonds, followed closely by cashews. For some reason, we hadn’t bought any for several months, so the last time I was at the local Publix, I bought a bag of raw almonds.

When I got home, Shawn was psyched to see the almonds, and opened the bag immediately. Reilly, seeing her mommy eating something, demanded her own cup. Shawn and Reilly sat down on the kitchen floor and dug in.

Reilly took her first almond, bit it in half, and then gave half to Shawn. To the casual observer, this might come off as just a nice sharing moment. To me, it was stunning. Reilly was recalling a behavior that Shawn and I had established many months ago: When Reilly was younger, we used to bite her almonds in half to ensure that the piece of nut was small enough for her to chew and therefore not choke on. So when Reilly made this gesture to her mom, Shawn looked up at me with a “isn’t our daughter amazing” smile. I gave her the look right back.

This weekend, Reilly’s “Uncle Willy” and “Uncle Drew” visited. When we were at the Farmer’s Market Saturday morning, Uncle Willy bought Reilly a bag of kettle corn, which is a huge event of spoiling, since Shawn and I are paranoid about Reilly choking on a popcorn kernel. Reilly ate that popcorn like a starved child, though eventually we were able to put it away when she was distracted by the live band.

In the vein of Reilly’s reversal of the words 'kitchen' and 'chicken, she later asked us for some acorns. After some head scratching, we realized that she was really asking for popcorn. It makes sense that she would reverse the words. Our big old oak tree is dumping acorns all over our house and yard at the rate of one per second, so the word ‘acorn’ is well established in her lexicon.

Later, when we had returned home, we were all watching our family of squirrels foraged around the foot of our oak tree. Reilly took one look at them and exclaimed, “Look, they’re eating popcorn!”