In this family, teenage rebellion is to be enjoyed because it invariably ends up with the kids insisting they'll make their own food: woohoo, Mum has a break from cooking! Even the incident of my sister blowing up the grill hasn't slowed us down. From childhood we've defied health and safety, eating frozen fish fingers and frozen peas. I personally have eaten a sindy orange.

Now though it's her son. The straps of the high chair horrify him like we're asking him to do a cartwheel inside an iron maiden. We've recently spread a plastic tablecloth over the five metres of carpet surrounding his high chair for when he flips the sweetcorn and tosses the turkey drummer bits, cackling.

He looks at the fork and spoon and starts off using them, stabbing them carefully into the turkey drummer and the mashed potato and I applaud him from the self-appointed safe area beyond the hatchway, a book of nursery rhymes by my left hand, ready to bring up to shield myself from flying food. Then he gives us a little smile, throws the fork and spoon down on the tray and starts slowly digging his fingers into the mashed potato, feeding himself that way.

He is not natural, this kid. His parents have raised him to love vegetables. They've kept his diet chocolate free, as low on carbohydrates and absolutely no junk food. And it's working. Offer him a grape, his eyes light up and he gobbles it. We fear the teenage years when he finds out about McDonalds, Subway and Burger King though. Then we have the nightmares of him coming home stuffing his face with cheeseburger. However he's got the gym membership already set up by his parents, ready to deal with the puppy fat. It's reckoned that by the time he enters nursery, he'll already look like an Adonis.

By that time he'll hopefully have stopped supplementing his meals with a handful of mud from the flowerbeds...yes, mud. Bam, bam! There's the sound from the kitchen and the warning rumble that he's gonna let forth with a yell. We open the door and he's off like a clown on stilts down the garden path, throwing himself into the flowerbeds and we're all hands on deck, prying open his fingers. "No eating dirt! No!"

He looks at us surprised, his chin already blackened then with a mental shrug gets up and toddles down the garden to have a drink from the garden pond. "No!"

Later this evening when his parents have picked him up, we set to clearing the lounge ready for tomorrow. Grapes retrieved from the sofa cushionsgood lord, how long has this grape been thereno wait I really don't want to know

I'm so looking forward to having my own kids to do this with!

Learn more about this author, Helen Gyselman.
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