Thursday, February 10, 2011

Picky eaters and creeping outside comfort zones

In our household, Rosie continues to limit her food choices the most. The only two meats she'll eat are white-meat chicken (no skin) and bacon. While she eats several vegetables, for some reason lately she's been eliminating fruits (won't eat bananas and says the canteloupe doesn't taste right—could be an out-of-season thing)? If we let her make the decisions, she would be eating starches all day, every day; her favorites are cereal, pasta, rice, chips, and breads. Thankfully, she will eat several kinds of easy-to-pack nuts and beans. I'm still struggling to assemble lunches for her that she will finish.

I'm counting this as a small victory: the two foods she's added to her favorites list in the past month are sugar snap peas and yaki-nori. While the nori has been reserved as a dinner-only treat, the pea pods are very easy to pack into her lunches. A newly beloved toy purchase (courtesy Monkeyrotica) may have been an inspiration behind the fascination with peapods:



Dash, on the other hand, has developed a taste for daifuku mochi, and wants to eat the tasty Japanese treats with every meal. I'm *not* NOT encouraging this at all, but those darned things are pretty hard to locate in this area. There aren't any Japanese groceries nearby and the ethnically Asian (mostly Korean-run) markets that we do have appear to have biases against Japanese goods and don't carry them. Monkeyrotica and Grandma Ikiko have found the treats in the outskirts of Prince George's County somewhere, and bless them. 


Overall, we are still at parenting-fail mode in terms of cooking one main course at dinner that everyone will eat. It seems to work for some families, but it's not happening here. Dinner last night was delicious lamb-burgers for Monkeyrotica and me, breakfast sausages for Dash, and chicken breast for Rosie. Everyone ate the broccoli, carrots, and french fries, so that was a winner, right?

Tell me about the food struggles you have with your kids in the comments!

3 comments:

  1. this worries me. if we have kids, i don't know how i'll deal with the eating thing. my parents always just forced us to eat, whether we liked it or not.

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  2. I'm of the school that thinks forcing kids to eat is an invitation to eating disorders and too much dinnertime drama. "You don't have to eat it, but you're not getting anything else" is the mantra. I just have to throw a whole buncha stuff on the table and see what sticks. And let the kids be in charge of portion control; if they want more, they can ask. Pile it on to their plate, and they won't touch it.

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  3. In general, I think the "one dinner" works well in theory, but in practice is a path of pain. It's like how I congratulated myself for knowing how to get a kid to sleep through the night when my first was easy to get to bed. Then I had Liam, and realized I had no control over it.

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