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...

C'mon Stan and Jan - Ever Heard of METER?!?!?

Claire adores Berenstain Bears books. Every time we go to the library, they're the only thing she wants to check out. I suggest many other books and they all get absent-mindedly shot down by Claire. The amazing thing is that we still haven't checked out a repeat. We've been at this for something close to a year and a half now, checking out a new batch about every month. We check out anywhere from 2 to 6 books every time. I keep thinking we'll get to the library and won't fing any new ones since we checked out everything we hadn't seen before the last umpteen times. But no, there's always at least a couple we haven't checked out before. (Knock on wood...) I don't know which impresses me more, the fact that our local library has so many holdings, or the fact that there are SO many Berenstain Bears books in existence!

I must reluctantly admit that Stan and Jan Berenstain have cranked out a few TOO many books. They have been writing the books since 1962 and although Stan has passed away, Jan and her son Mike are still going strong. After over 40 years, they've pretty much inundated the market and some of the books do seem a bit like they're stretching for plots. Sometimes I envision watching Berenstain Bears books being created as something akin to looking in the window at the Krispy Kreme store, with conveyor belts of books being cut to size, fried, and drizzled with a cloyingly sweet glaze. However, whatever their shortcomings, I still have a special place in my heart for the book producing machine that is Stan and Jan. I grew up LOVING the books. I think I'm living vicariously through Claire. I always wanted to have read ALL the ones pictured on the back cover of the old classic square ones. It was like "collecting them all." But growing up, my library hardly had any of them. So far I... I mean we are making excellent progress. We only have 5 more to go: Trouble with Money, Too Much Junk Food, The Bad Dream, Forget Their Manners, and Get Stage Fright!

The classic ones are great, but there are also the other ones. Board books about babies, bizarre mysteries, and worst of all, the ones entirely in verse. I keep naively checking out this last type. I get suckered in by the appealing topics usually related to various holidays and in my rush to keep Scott from getting out of my sight, we dump it in the basket without me cracking it open and seeing that it's in verse. You'd think I'd learn. They're usually bigger and more rectangular than the others. Apparently they're bigger so they can fit in all the cut-rate rhyming narrative. Look, I know they're just kids' books, but I could do better, WAY better. And I haven't been writing books for four decades. I suppose technically the verse in these books does rhyme, but that's about all you can say for it. It's like Stan and Jan were absent the day their English teacher explained rhyming schemes. And I think they may have waved the text somewhere near meter, but not much stuck. I'll be reading along out loud to Claire and starting to think maybe I've been too hard on these books. Maybe they're not so bad. Then I hit a line than just falls flat on it's face. The meter feels like it tripped on it's own shoelaces and did a face-plant in the dirt (sometimes knocking out a couple front teeth in the process). Sometimes I wonder if they wrote these rhyming ones in their old age as their memory started to go. Maybe they would forget what the line before it had sounded like and so they had to do the best they could. Yah, that's probably it. I'll tell myself that so that I... I mean we can continue our tireless pursuit of having read the exhaustive works of the Berenstain Bears.

Scott's Holding Out on Us (or Tantrums are Rude Awakenings)

Scott can talk. I'm sure of it. I bet when we're not listening, he gives lengthy discourses to his toy cars on doll stroller trade routes through our living room.

But for now, I'm afraid talking has turned into a power struggle. When M and I encourage him to talk, he gets SO mad. We try to encourage him to ask for what he wants with a word -- any word. But as soon as he realizes that we understand him and we're holding out on him to try and get him to speak, he starts crying, swiping at the air in front of him, and turning his head and refusing to look at us. He's just SO stubborn. I think he's just not talking to spite us!

Scott's tantrums lately have cemented a theory of mine. The "experts" say toddlers start throwing tantrums because they get frustrated that they cannot communicate what they want. I think the "experts" are full of it. My experiences with both Claire and Scott have been that toddlers throw tantrums when they communicate what they want and are forced to confront the fact that sometimes they will not get it. Perhaps when they're little they are under the delusion that they could have anything they want if they could just tell us what it is. But then they get old enough to grunt and gesticulate their wants and they understand enough to know they have communicated their desire successfully. And then we refuse to give it to them! That's when the real screaming starts. We know what they want and we won't give it to them. It must be a very rude awakening. It seems that tantrums abate only when a child becomes old enough that you can reason with them about WHY they cannot have what they want. (I think at about 19?)

Hopping on the Blogwagon

I was chatting with a dear friend from college yesterday and she asked me about blogging. Apologies to her ahead of time if she reads this since I'm shamelessly reusing material from that conversation. Her other mommy friend told her about her blog within 2 days of me telling her about mine. "Is it the new craze?" she asks. I dunno. It does kinda seem like a fad. Everyone and their dog is doing it. (Really. Someone out their keeps a blog on behalf of their dog who is also the narrator of a book. For all I know, there could actually be a dog out there who bangs out some stuff on the keyboard and gets it posted. And though some blogs claim to be generated by humans, you'd never know given the quality of content. I think a dog might do a BETTER job. Of course, rest assured I'm not talking about your blog.) So how do I feel about joining the faceless throng of bloggers? And why are there so many mommy blogs in particular?

I don't know the answer to the first question. But I have some theories about the second. Cheap shots - there's much easier jokes to be had in life as a parent. Kids make such excellent blog fodder. You don't need wit, skill, or anything like that. Just fertility and the ability to type intelligibly (which does put you ahead of most dogs...) The kids generate the material for you whether you want them to or not. I just hope my blog never turns into a place to post the "up to the minute" record of the latest crappy snapshot I took of my kid. (Again, I'm not talking about your blog... Besides, I have to sheepishly admit that's what I use my Shutterfly Collection for!) I hope that the occasional photo I post is either decent to look at or illustrates a point I am making in my writing.

But how do I feel about the Y.A.B. status ("Yet Another Blogger")? Like I said, I'm not sure. My gut reaction is that I shouldn't be blogging then. But M is always pointing out my tendency to think that if "everyone" is doing something, that automatically makes it bad. You should hear my sister and me when we get to talking, dissing things left and right just because it's "typical." It can really get out of hand. I wish I was more like M. He always says, "Maybe everyone is doing it because it's the right answer. Maybe they figured something out that you haven't." This is why we own a minivan. He gave me the preceding lecture and then dragged me off to test drive minivans. He was right. The minivan was better for hauling my "brood." There's just so much ROOM inside and I'm kidding myself if I think I actually would use the extra ground clearance of an SUV. But I'd like to think the minivan superiority was an isolated incident. I mean, if I give in on this philosophy then I worry that next week I'll have Thomas Kinkade paintings on my walls and my kids will be living off fruit snacks (READ: candy). (I'm not sure a "I'm not talking about you" comment will work on this one. Sorry if either of those describe you. I still like you, they're just not for me.) But I guess for now I will plow ahead with blogging because I'm having so much fun with it and try to ignore the little voice in my head saying, "You're turning into a cookie cutter replica of everyone else!" The little voice is probably still cramming its family and all their stuff into a little Honda Pilot anyway, so what does it know?

I Mowed the Lawn!!!

This post has nothing to do with my kids for once. They're usually the reason I listen for a laugh track, but not this time. Today I was thinking about how absurd I sound proudly announcing that I mowed the lawn. I got a huge blister doing it (could I be any more of a pansy?), but I did it. This everyday task that is mundane for others is a milestone for me. I've never mowed a lawn before. Never even used a lawn mower before. I know what you're thinking. I must have grown up with a bunch of brothers that always did it. Nope. One younger sister, that's it. The real reason? My parents didn't HAVE a lawn until I went away to college. Now before you go thinking that my parents were lazy, trashy, or [fill in your favorite derogatory term here], let me tell you a little background.

I'm from Silicon Valley. My parents had to buy the mother of all fixer uppers to be able to afford a house. The front yard had been SO bad with the previous owners that when my parents ripped everything out and kept it as plain dirt for several years, all the neighbors actually thanked them. No really. People passing by would stop and comment on what a great job they were doing. I suppose it was a big improvement not to have a compost heap in the front yard anymore... My parents bought the house when I was in junior high and were kept plenty busy until I went away to college making the inside habitable. Filling in the "root cellar" the previous owners had dug (which was compromising the foundation) with concrete. Scraping linoleum off the hard wood floors. Replacing tubs and sinks that had been painted. Everyone has their priorities and the front yard was pretty low on the list. Though this tidbit doesn't really affect my lack of mowing know-how because I was pretty much out of the house, the saga of my parents' front yard came to an amusing conclusion. My dad didn't want any grass and my mom did. In the end, they worked out a compromise where my dad is okay with grass because my mom mows it. So I guess lawn mowing is destined to be a subject with strange associations for me.

Ah, but now I have experienced the rite of passage. I have mowed a lawn. I think that might even qualify me as a fairly normal human being. I suppose that's still open to debate...