Minor said his first word–”‘nana”–naming the fruit for which he has an almost unnatural passion. He requests bananas for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Whenever he spies one of those yellow beauties, he cries “Nana! Nana! Nana!” at top volume until he receives one or cries himself senseless–whichever comes first–leading us to hide the bananas in the cupboard and spell out the word in casual conversation. His love does not discriminate between peel and fruit, and he’s been known to eat the bitter skin when left unmonitored.

The cure for this, of course, would be to peel the banana BEFORE I give it to him. I’m not an idiot; this is what I used to do. At some point, though, he started demanding the banana half-peeled. One day he spotted the leftover peel on the counter, and cried and pointed to it; Husband let him play with it. The next day he cried for it while we were peeling the banana. A few repetitions later, and he would only accept bananas with the peel on.

This reminds me of a story I read in a dog-training book about a dog who would only eat when his owners stood outside their apartment and rang the doorbell. The trainer observed that it was a pretty neat trick for the dog to have taught the owners. It turns out that preverbal creatures are masters of operant conditioning, which is why Minor found it so easy to train me, against my better instincts, to give him unpeeled bananas.

I think I’m going to rename his playpen the “Skinner box.”