Despite my efforts to serve nutritious meals, I’m pretty sure
that my children think the four food groups are: sugar, sodium,
caffeine and cholesterol.
Despite my efforts to serve nutritious meals, I’m pretty sure that my children think the four food groups are: sugar, sodium, caffeine and cholesterol.
Maybe I’m not giving my son and daughter enough credit, but when I serve anything with a shade of natural coloring, I spend hours preparing it. Then, later, I spend 30 minutes scraping the leftovers down the sink, while lamenting about the plight of starving children in Indonesia. The eating phases my children have gone through would scare the tooth fairy into collecting dentures.
The first phase I ever experienced was “the transportation phase.” Every night at dinnertime, our table became busier than a commuter route at rush hour. I recreated the sounds of planes, trains, cars or anything I could fly around the table on a spoon, and land in my son’s mouth.
“Open the tunnel, here comes the train” worked for most pasta dishes. “Vroom! Vroom! The winning race car in the Indy 500 is arriving for a pit stop,” worked for steamed vegetables.
Eating an entire meal without transportation sound effects eventually arrived, which I’d like to think is due to my incredible parenting skills, but it’s actually because the second eating phase – at least it has been for generations in my family – is the “everything with ketchup” phase. I used to allow my kids to slather ketchup all over their food because, well, ketchup was made from a vegetable, and it enticed them to eat.
We decided to stop dining in public when my daughter entered the “food as an accessory” phase during dinner at a Mexican canteen. She wore olives on her fingertips, sour cream lipstick and a tortilla hat. Her picture was taken by a group of tourists, who were sitting at the next table, and is probably to this day, still displayed in a foreign consulate, as an example of American restaurant etiquette.
My daughter eventually went to the “let’s-make-a-deal” phase, where every meal was like eating with a 5-year old used car salesman. “Eat four or five more bites,” I would beg, pushing the plate toward her, “and then you’ll get ice cream.”
This stage lasted through my son’s “food-as-a-weapon” stage (when he tried to hit the cat by catapulting his corn off the table with a fork), and his “food-as-a-filler” stage (when he stuffed peas into every accessible body crevice).
My children entered the fast-food stage at the same time. No matter where we were, or never mind if we were in our own kitchen, I had to stuff the main course into a Styrofoam container, and serve it in a paper bag with fries and a Disney toy.
Now, of course, I’m lucky to get my kids to the table, since they’re in the “I’m too busy to sit down at the table phase,” and instead, they’re insisting that they can eat dinner while talking on the phone or watching TV.
I remember recently when my children set the table and waited patiently for their meal. I watched my son eat his carrots all by himself, while my daughter finished the main course. No one had the TV on in the background, no telephone was connected to my daughter’s ear. It was so quiet I could hear the sound of silverware on the plate. A knot formed in my stomach and I pushed back my chair.
“Where are you going, Mom?” my daughter asked. “Aren’t you going to eat?”
I shook my head. “It’s too quiet in here,” I said, as I carried my plate to the sink. “I can’t eat a single bite.”
Debbie Farmer is a humorist and a mother of two kids, holding down the fort in California. She is also the author of Don’t Put Lipstick on the Cat and can be reached at www.familydaze.com, o by writing fa********@***************es.com.
