Thursday, March 5, 2009

Waging war at the dinner table? A thing of the past for the Storys

Those of you who know us as parents know that Mac has not inherited our parental legacy of eating whatever is put in front of him as long as it slows down long enough to be eaten. You really would think that we had fed him something as an infant or toddler that made him so distrustful of us and our attempts to feed him well. We have indulged this picky eating and it has very nearly driven me crazy. I am a good cook and when this child turns his nose up at my offerings and says he only like school food (WHAT?), it is very aggravating.

When we were in Salvador last week, we had breakfast at the hotel every morning, as is customary here in Brazil. Mac ate some awful chocolate puffy cereal every single morning followed by white bread rolls. I know. We're up for Parents of the Year with that breakfast. The thing with chocolate puffy cereal is that it has nothing nutritious in it to fill you up and stick to your ribs so approximately 24 minutes after leaving the hotel restaurant, the mantra began: "I'm hungry. I need a snack."

After day 2 of this, we were tired of hearing the whining. I mean, does his teacher have to listen to him times 18 every morning before snack time?

Jimmy told Mac that he needed to eat some protein so that got me thinking that we were going to have to force eggs on the kid. Mac ate eggs very briefly as a toddler or whenever it is that you can first introduce eggs. Jimmy has made it out as though eggs were his favorite food. I don't remember it quite that way, but I do remember that he ate eggs.

I decided that we were going to have to show some tough love. So on Monday morning, when Mac got up for school, I asked him what he wanted for breakfast. His normal response is peanut butter toast, cinnamon toast, cereal (Frosted Flakes - remember we are in the running for Parents of the Year), waffles or pancakes. Monday's answer was cinnamon toast. So I told him that he could have a slice of cinnamon toast if he ate eggs. He only had to eat one bite. I made wonderful scrambled eggs. Simple. Everybody eats scrambled eggs. Not Mac. He picked up the most miniscule piece of scrambled egg that you can make stick to a fork tine and every time he got it near his face, he started this gagging that actually produced a little vomit. Well that just really ticked me off. It's one little piece of egg. So then he tried to hold his nose and eat it - more gagging, more histrionics, more throwing up. By now, we were all in a foul mood. The windows were open so I'm sure the neighbors thought we were beating him because of all the yelling and crying.

By now it was time to catch the bus, so the cinnamon toast went in the trash, the egg went in the trash, and I cut up an apple quickly for him to eat. (I could not - even in my running for Parent of the Year - send him to school without anything to eat at all). He must have been hungry because the kid who isn't so hip on fruit ate nearly the entire apple before the bus got there.

I decided I needed to strike while the iron was hot, so I went to the grocery store to buy the ingredients for my first week of meals by SavingDinner.com. My friend Alisa uses this service and got me hooked on the concept. You pay a small fee and they email you a different menu each week. You can choose regular, low-fat, or low-carb. I still have a little South Beach wannabe in me, so I chose low-carb. Six meals are included in the menu so you can pick which you want depending on how many nights you'll be at home, whether you want to cook more of one meal and have leftovers, etc. In addition to the menu, you get this full grocery list that's broken out by category like dairy, produce, staples, meat, etc and then each item on the list has the meal number by it, so you can scratch that off the list if you're not cooking that particular meal. As you may know, I LOVE a good list, so this was right up my alley.

So for the first week, I chose 3 meals. I was quite confident that each meal would not be well-received, but I was going on tough-love adrenaline. Oh, another benefit of SavingDinner.com? Meal preparation and cooking time is something like 30 minutes tops as best I can tell. Revolutionary.

Night one was General Tsao's chicken, brown rice, and steamed broccoli. A nice, healthy, balanced meal. Jimmy had to work late so I prepared dinner, fixed Mac's plate so that nothing touched anything else to avoid cross-contamination of foods and placed it in front of him. The poor kid must have been scared to death to question the dinner because he said not one word about anything. I have probably served him broccoli 467 times and he's always said he only eats broccoli at school (which the teacher said is true), but Monday night, he told me he only liked the tree part and not the stem. Fine. You can't win every battle, right? He ate a few bites of the brown rice (which is a few bites more than the last time he was served brown rice), a few broccoli trees, and had 3 servings of General Tsao's chicken (which was minus the red pepper flakes to avoid hot spice for him). You could've knocked me over with a feather.

Mac has been on a serious ice cream kick lately and again, we overindulged. Tough love called for no dessert except on weekends. So after he ate, he asked for dessert. I explained that we were only having dessert on the weekend and that he could eat fruit if he wanted to. He chose to eat a banana.

Night two was southwest pork chops served with a corn and tomato salsa with black beans on the side. He didn't like the corn in the salsa and the black beans were too spicy for him, but he did eat the tomatoes in the salsa (SHOCKING!) and the pork chops. Dinner was followed by 3 little bananas after which he said his stomach hurt. No kidding. His bowels must be in knots from the influx of ruffage into his system.

Night three was a total bust by all accounts. It was beef covered in a very good mushroom sauce with mashed cauliflower (supposed to be mashed potato-esque) and roasted asparagus. I bought a terrible cut of beef that was really chewy, I didn't steam the cauliflower long enough so it wasn't anything like mashed potatoes in consistency, and there was no fresh asparagus so I bought frozen which should not be allowed to be sold in modern grocery stores. But we had a discussion that sometimes meals don't turn out as we'd hoped, we still need to be polite to the cook and thank them for their efforts, and then we can eat fruit afterwards.

Last night after the disastrous meal, he said he'd really like pizza, so I made delicious pizza tonight (rather than ordering in, which is what he really wanted). And I think we all enjoyed it!!

The really great thing is that meal times used to be time for battle, but it's just so much more pleasant now. Nobody sulks over the meal, we have nice, pleasant conversation, and my days as a short-order cook are over! Why didn't we do this years ago????

We've also cut out junk food for snacks after school. Today, for example, he had carrots, yogurt, bagel chips, and some little club social crackers. I can't tell you what a difference this is from just a week ago when a typical snack might have been yogurt if we were lucky but would have definitely involved doritos or potato chips or some other highly processed food that leaves grease stains on your clothes and fingers.

We're really trying to emphasize healthy eating versus eating to avoid fat. Mac is nothing but bone and muscle right now and I don't want him to have a fat complex. So instead we've talked about how a heart works in conjunction with arteries and that if we eat too much fat, the arteries get clogged and the blood can't get through and the heart has to work harder. No need to get into genetics right now which from my dad's side show that really no matter what you eat, you're going to have clogged arteries, which then begs the question of why can't we just eat doritos everyday. But we'll save that for another time.

We may have a battle royale in the morning because Friday is another egg day. While he was eating his apple at the bus stop on Monday, we struck a compromise. During the school week, we agreed to have two egg days, two cereal days, and one waffle/pancake day. The agreed-upon schedule is eggs on Monday, cereal on Tuesday, syrup food on Wednesday, cereal on Thursday and the detested eggs again on Friday. It's been a quick week and here we are again at egg day.

Mac got a little weepy at supper tonight when we discussed that it was egg day. I've offered to put cheese in the eggs, or to serve it with ketchup like my grandfather always ate his eggs, but nothing seems to interest him. He loves these bagel chips and I just got a batch from our bagel store today, so I think that's how I'm going to entice him. Maybe if I drop just a tiny bit of egg on a bite-size piece of bagel chip, he'll be suckered into eating it. Could I be so lucky? I have no idea, but stay tuned because I'll definitely keep you posted!

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