The Creation of My Food Monsters - Part I

Before I had kids, I heard a story about a mom who actually packed boxes of Pop Tarts to feed her Picky Eater while travelling abroad. I was appalled at her bad parenting skills. Pride goeth before a fall, apparently.

I started strong, priding myself on feeding my babies pure breastmilk and homemade baby food. No jarred Gerber Meat Sticks or Trix yogurt for my brood. My plan began to go south the day I fed baby Abadoo the pureed green beans I'd lovingly spent the last half hour preparing. She promptly spit them out. It wasn't many months later that Abadoo displayed her talent of taking a complete bite of taco, spitting out all the green bits I'd snuck in there, and ingesting the rest. My one year old child could already outsmart me in the food department. I persevered.

M&M, my second-born, is also my most creative child, and that creativity extended to the ways in which she chose to eat her food. The child could make a mess out of a slice of American cheese, mushing it into the high chair tray with her finger before scooping up the gloppy mess and getting perhaps one-half of it into her actual mouth. The other half usually dropped down into her actual diaper, which was exposed because I had prudently stripped off her clothing before mealtime.

Which is why I struck Red Sauce off our Mealtime List. Both Abadoo and M&M had enjoyed tomato sauce on their pasta; but I got tired of scrubbing dried red sauce off my walls and my clothing. Big Mistake. By the time they were old enough to refrain from rubbing red sauce into their scalps, they wanted nothing to do with the stuff, even on pizza - unless said pizza was ordered from Chuck-E-Cheese's. As we rarely went to Chuck-E-Cheese's after my kids became old enough to realize that you needed tokens to actually play the games there, red sauce disappeared from our repertoire. Since my homemade pies were made with whole-wheat crust and cheese, I rationalized that it was still healthy, and I caved to their demands for sauceless pizza.

The Food Monsters were now in control.