Feeding my children is one of those things I'm terrible at. Sometimes I feel like I'm one Cheerio away from letting them eat lollipops for breakfast. I mean, wouldn't it just be easier? Let me describe my troubles.
My girls are fussy eaters. You may be saying to yourself, "I hear you, sister," but you need to mutiply whatever fussiness you think you have with your kids and multiply it by 765.
The good? They love breakfast. They have happily given up cow's milk and all sugar-sweetened cereals. They can demolish two bowls of oatmeal or Shredded Wheat or that puffed rice jazz in a matter of minutes, asking for a fruit smoothie chaser to wash it all down. Also good? They're pretty good lunch eaters. Containers come home mostly empty and if there's a complaint, it's usually because I didn't put enough in or they didn't have enough time to eat. They also don't eat a shitload of sweets. They would if they could, but seem to be pretty resigned to the fact that they still have Hallowe'en candy up on the highest linen closet shelf. No biggie.
Here's the bad. And it's oh so bad. They eat nothing at dinner. Ok, when there's pasta, they eat a lot. When it's anything else, they eat mouse bites so they can get away from the awful table with their awful cranky mother and father as quickly as possible. We negotiate. We cajole. There's tears. I change the rules every week based on some shit I read. Pete and I look at each other across the table with a "remember Paris?" look in our eyes, even though we've never been there together. It blows.
If we rewind a tad, making the dinner itself is almost always a chore. We often have meal plans, but they're uninspired. Pizza on Fridays, pasta, stir-fry, soup and sandwiches, scrambled eggs, blah, blah, blergh.
So I got help. I've been doing that a lot lately, and I'll tell you more soon about the other areas of my life I'm cleaning up. With the food thing, a book caught my eye a few months ago so I ordered it for my Kindle. "French Kids Eat Everything (and Yours Can, Too)".
I was desperate to move away from buying useless vegetarian or vegan cooking for kids books and move toward a deeper change. I had to teach my kids to love veggies without cutting them into star shapes, dousing them in soy sauce or hiding them in brownies.
This book? Mon cherie, it has changed my life. Without going through all the food rules, here's the gist:
- Cut out excessive snacking (or snacking altogether)
- Make meal times enjoyable
- Encourage, but never cajole (you have to try it, but you don't have to like it)
- Never use food as a distraction, reward or punishment
- It takes several tries to like most things - be patient
I needed recipe inspiration first. I found a good cookbook - "You, Me, and the Kids, Too".
It's from the UK and it focuses on making simple food for kids at any age. I needed one cookbook to follow for a few weeks and decided this would be it, but I had to get over a mental hurdle first: although it focuses on healthy, whole foods eating, it isn't vegan or even vegetarian. I've been working on my own nutritional goals for so long, that I'd forgotten what it's like to think completely about the nutrition of my kids - to turn them into well-adjusted, healthy people who weren't afraid of vegetables. So I decided we would eat meat again for awhile and even a little bit of yogurt if I was going to go for this experiment 100%. I needed to not be hung up on my own rules.
We're now in week two of this Frenchified life and I am amazed at so many interesting changes. Limiting snacking was hard, very hard, at first. but now the girls regularly remind each other "it's almost dinner" or "you don't want to ruin your appetite!". Every night we've been eating tasty meals with new flavours and every lunch time the girls get a veggie in their lunch (I'm embarrassed to admit they weren't getting that before - they didn't like anything, so I didn't bother putting anything in).
Stella is turning out to be my star in the "try it, you might like it" movie. Going away are the "yuck" or "I hate it" or the cringy face as a seven-year old tongue darts out to taste the tip of an unknown veggie. She's actually game for all this and plays waitress before dinner so we can all tell her we want what's already written down on the menu for that day so she can jot it on her notepad and tape it to the cabinet.
I've been painfully aware that I've been failing my kids in the food department. It's become even more painful as I get closer to finding my own nutritional bliss. Just because they don't eat fruit loops for breakfast or Lik-A-Stik for lunch, doesn't mean I'm doing right by them. I've been cranky and resentful that they aren't naturally taking to the vegetarian life I've chosen for us all instead of diving into the food education of my girls with passion and joie de vivre. I've had more fun cooking over the past week than I have in forever.
These are not 20 minute meals for the most part. I'm not looking for American-style time savers and processed shortcuts. But we aren't dining on Coq au Vin or creme brulee either. It's simple, tasty food that the girls look forward to every night, even if they only have one bite. It'll happen eventually. They'll love their veggies. Say what?!
J'aime le français.
