Every few days, we’ve been letting Eli have a toy from his Christmas stocking. The latest is a basket of plastic vegetables.

Eli isn’t what I’d call a vegetable eater, beyond fries and ketchup and cheese sandwiches, assuming that ketchup is a vegetable. Given that fact, I thought Eli would play with them for a while and then forget about them.

Was I ever wrong. He drags them around the house, dumping them out of their basket and putting them back in. He shoves them in his mouth and spits them back out with a “pbuh” noise. He washes them, thus removing any plastic pesticides or plastic bugs from them.

However, some vegetables are more equal than others. Eli demanded that the vegetables join him in the bath tonight, making a kind of toddler soup with garnish. When I gave them to him, he handed some back to me. “You take these. You take these.” He divided them into two groups:

“Those vegetables are not funny,” he told me. “These vegetables are very good.” He then popped the red pepper in his mouth like a cigar.