When Avadore went to bed last night, he asked for chocolate milk. (Which is actually chocolate Ovaltine, by why get technical?) I told him he could have some in the morning with a bagel.

Sure enough, he woke up wanting his milk. I offered him the bagel and he informed me they were all gone. I told him I'd bought some more. There's nothing better than having a three-year-old jump up and down with excitement because you did something so simple as pick up a package of blueberry bagels when you went to the store last.

Avadore loves bagels. He's insane about them, and cream cheese, too. He ran to the kitchen and we toasted his bagel. I pulled out some cream cheese and apricot preserves (I like to mix the two for my bagel), which Avadore didn't see me do. When he finally saw the preserves on the counter, he informed me he didn't want any of that, and went digging in the fridge for the cream cheese. When I showed him it was on the counter he got so excited, yelling, "Yay! Cream cheese!"

When I was Avadore's age I had no idea what a bagel was and I'd never really been exposed to a lot of cream cheese. I grew up in small town Idaho. Other nearby small towns, which were bigger than we were, joked about how we were 20 years behind them. And they were probably right. What's really scary is that people joke about these towns being 5 to 10 years behind the rest of the country.

I was a teenager before I had my first bagel and cream cheese. And, you know, it was just pretty fabulous. My father brought some newly stocked bagels home from the grocery store with some cream cheese one evening, excited with what he'd found. My father grew up in the same small town where I was reared, a mile from where I grew up. But before settling there, he'd lived in New York, California, and had traveled pretty extensively. He'd been around. He knew the joys of bagels and cream cheese.

I think the best bagel I've ever had was in Tucson, Arizona. It had been baked fresh only a few hours before I ate it. It was strawberry, had been slathered in butter, toasted in an oven, and then had been piled with strawberry cream cheese. It was the gigantic -- the biggest bagel I've ever seen. It was lovely.

The second best bagel I've ever had came from the grocery store about a mile from the house I live in now. It, too, was pretty fresh and had been covered with asiago cheese before being baked. When warmed or toasted, the cheese bubbled and melted. The store no longer makes their own bagels...

I've never made real bagels, though I've made gluten-free bagels for Rice, and they're actually quite good. I expect that one of these days soon I'm going to be making a lot more bagels as time allows. The time to go on Rice's diet so that the new kid can hopefully avoid developing a gluten-intolerance like his dad has is coming soon... At least cream cheese tends to be gluten-free.