The third generation

Jacob’s recently been being a toddler in the sense that he won’t eat anything but his favourite cereal, Daddy’s chocolate oatmeal or peanut butter and honey sandwiches. His parents, in spite of being assured “they all go through this” have been pulling their hair out trying strategy after strategy to counteract this.
Just a few minutes ago, though, he downed about half of Vikki’s cup of Lee’s special cafetiere coffee. This after eating a whole(!) Granny Smith apple!
For two and one-half years he would eat anything. Literally anything. OK, maybe not brussel sprouts but while Vikki likes them Lee thinks they should be reclassified as a crime against humanity and someone should go to prison for it (them?)! Anyway, Jake ate things with garlic in them, loved broccoli, carrots, eggs…. Now it takes tricky diplomacy that would have Richard Holbrooke in tears to get a bite of chicken down him, but he’ll knock down a cup of coffee in an instant!
So is this unprecedented? No (in a word!). Lee grew up with a hankering for Grandad’s coffee (OK, the *smell* of his Dad’s coffee) and once he got to Germany and discovered that coffee can actually taste as good as it smells (Starbucks didn’t exist in Central Virginia back in the Pleistocene Period of the 1980’s) quickly began to make up for lost time. Legend has it, however, that Grandad Jim used to slurp down 13 or 14 cups a day of the stuff. Mind you we’re talking about Folgers, Maxwell House and other sweepings off of proper coffee producers floors at the end of the day so it takes 14 cups to begin to feel anything.
Nevertheless, the tradition goes on and has now appeared far earlier than anticpated in the third generation of Alley boys. We’ll see how little Corr Alley gets on with the liquid turbo-bean in a few years now.