How I Got Over the Food Blues By Serving the Kraft Blues

I did it. Just like everyone else. Before I had kids, there were things I SWORE I would never do, things my kids would never do, ways we would never be. It seemed so simple then. I mean, most of my pre-kids vows matched up pretty closely with how I was raised. If my parents managed it, I could too, right? I wasn't over the top, there were only a few. If you kept the number small, then you could manage to actually do them, right? Alas, perhaps somehow I am lacking as a parent, but it was not to be...

I love, love, love food. (A little too much in fact, but that's a different issue for a different post...) Not only do I love food, but I love foreign food, exotic food, spicy food, over-the-top food. (I suppose there's a little overlap there, but you get my gist.) I like food to be out-of-the-ordinary. At least my hu'band tells me that it's out-of-the-ordinary for a white girl from the suburbs. As far as I'm concerned, I grew up with a lot of it and it's "ordinary." My favorite food in the whole world is a toss up between two Thai salads: yum nua and laab. It pains me that I have yet to discover a Thai restaurant here in the Austin area that serves them. (Let me know if you find one...) It's quite possibly my biggest complaint about living here - a distinct lack of Asian food except for maybe Vietnamese.

Anyway, my point is that I grew up eating like this, so I expected my kids to be "good eaters." I believed that it was a matter of offering a variety from an early age (no problem there) and being a little hard nosed about it (I can do that). Boy was I wrong! Claire was a dream eater until she was about 2 1/2. I have no idea what happened. She used to live off broccoli, green beans, peas, Indian curry, stir fry, etc. It was great, she just ate whatever we ate, or maybe even a little healthier! And then it happened. It wasn't immediate, but slowly her eating evolved to the point where, by my standards of what constitutes "good food," she won't eat ANYTHING! And if there's more than a touch of paprika in something, she complains that it's too "smicy." Ugh, what a weakling!!! I tried everything. I tried bribing her to eat her food, threatening her, re-offering the same food over and over for each successive meal, giving her a set amount of time to eat, and of course the ever-popular making her sit at the table until she ate her food. Nothing worked. All I succeeded in doing was making her stop eating everything, even typical kid foods, because it had become a power struggle. (My kids and I seem to really have problems with power struggles. M blames me because he says I'm a control freak...) I always figured that kids won't starve themselves to death. If Claire wanted to eat, she could eat what we were having. There was a HUGE hole in this logic that I never considered back when I was doing my pre-kid vowing: They may not starve themselves to death, but hungry cranky kids are nearly unbearable. Perhaps my parents never had to deal with the kind of will-power Claire possesses, who knows? My Claire however would refuse to eat pretty much all day, and then when it came time to go to bed, she would stay awake for hours crying that she was hungry... What do you do? If we tried to hold out on her, then the next day she was hungry and tired! And I was losing out on sleep over it too. (She was up asking for bread in bed until about 11pm or so every night.) So the next day we were both even more obstinate and cranky. Vicious cycle.

The horrors of all this reached a crescendo about the time Claire turned three. She had a yearly check up with the pediatrician so I explained what was going on and ask him what to do. I thought for sure he would just write me off as paranoid, but he actually took me seriously. Maybe too seriously. I'm glad he didn't write me off completely, because really, I know kids that age can be sparse eaters, but Claire basically wasn't eating anything. The staying awake hungry was the big worry. But the last thing I expected was for him to prescribe her an appetite stimulant. This was a wake up call for me. Medicate my child just because she wouldn't eat sushi and lentil soup? How could I fill that prescription? Had I really tried everything else? I talked it through with M and rethought my whole approach. Whatever she would eat (within reason, still no chocolate cake for breakfast a la Bill Cosby) was okay. Roll with it. No power struggle. We'd give her food she liked and set a timer for 15 minutes. No big deal, the only "blame" went to the timer. After a few meals, it worked! She certainly wasn't eating gyoza (pot stickers) or anything, but she was at least eating something. And so I've resigned myself to typical kid fare. Before I had kids, I swore my kids wouldn't live off of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, chicken nuggets, and macaroni and cheese. But guess what my kids frequently eat now?

I NEVER ate these things before. In fact, I distinctly remember the time I went babysitting as a teenager and as the parents rushed out the door they said, "We thought we'd make it easy on you. We left a box of macaroni and cheese by the stove for dinner." EASY?!?!? I'd never made mac'n'cheese in my life! It turned out okay since I am capable of reading directions on a box, but I never ate it again until I married M, who thinks of the blue and yellow box as something like dessert. (As far as typical American food goes, don't even get me started on casseroles. I'll never forget the horror the first time a roommate in college served me Tater Tot Casserole... Tater tots alone were strange enough without smothering them in fat and calling it a casserole! I only like typical American food when I'm pregnant.) But anyway, now that I've loosened up a little bit on what I serve my kids, Claire will occasionally eat other things. Now that we've gotten her back into the "eating habit," she's even amenable now to our insistence that she take at least one bite of whatever we're having. Then we give in and make her something else. We're such suckers...