Parker’s caked himself in applesauce again.

Jamie had asked her mother to stop giving him the stupid squeeze packets each time they visited, now that he’s started refusing to eat applesauce from a spoon—only from the packets, even if they cost more at the grocery store. But today, again, as she was buckling her one-year-old son back into his car seat, her mother had come rambling down the front porch steps and shoved another into his grubby hands.

“Just one for the road,” she’d insisted, a semi-innocent smile on her face. “He didn’t eat much dinner.”