Picket Fence Post

I have no more energy left to fight this battle.

With my 8-year-old.

Over what he’s going to eat for dinner every night.

I.

Have.

Had.

It.

And I’m tired of all these so-called food experts telling me that if I just make this, or serve something this way, or have the kid help me make something, or put smiley faces on the plate, or offer to put TV in his bedroom with unlimited TV viewing that he will eat the well rounded meals we make. I’m tired of reading articles telling me that if I keep serving up a wide array of foods I can turn any kid into a foodie. Newsflash for you folks: Ain’t gonna happen. Not with our youngest child. The Spouse and I have been trying for many years now. So I wish the food consultants would stop making me feel like a failure because The Youngest Boy won’t eat most of the food we serve him.

The Youngest Boy has NEVER been a good eater. When he was just a baby and starting to eat baby food, he refused veggies and quickly rejected almost everything but a handful of pureed fruits. I pulled out his baby book the other day and here’s an excerpt from the food section, “At 9 months, he despised chunky baby food. Wasn’t overly fond of carrots. Started rejected all baby food at 11 months. Then started rejecting most food.”

Carbs. That’s all he wanted. Even when I tried making the baby food myself, that didn’t work either.

I’ve consulted the cookbooks about slipping pureed veggies and meats into “kid friendly” foods to give them more of the nutrients they need. But the Youngest Boy caught on and would, most of the time, notice the difference. I’ve asked the pediatrician for suggestions and she’s, frankly, at a loss. I’ve tried to go the hey-let’s-make-everything-look-like-shapes route. I’ve had him cook with me. No dice.

This is the kid who can make himself vomit at will if The Spouse or I try to make him eat. (He’s also the same kid who goes absolutely nutty if he goes for more than three hours without food. It gets ugly. Trust me.) Once, I made him try, just try, one bite, of a banana. After about 10 minutes of cajoling and bribing, he took a bite, swished it around in his mouth, then vomited it back up. The same went for a piece of baked chicken we insisted he eat a year or so ago at the dinner table. It ended the same, stomach churning way.

Here’s what he WILL eat: Mac-n-cheese (ONLY from “the blue box,” ONLY some of the time though it’s difficult to predict when those times might be, ONLY if it’s not “too cheesy,” NEVER homemade), bean burritos with cheese, scrambled eggs, bagels with cream cheese, waffles, pancakes, cereal, apples, carrot sticks, peanut butter sandwiches, pasta with very plain marinara sauce on the side and an occasional meatball, hamburgers, pizza and a turkey sandwich (ONLY if it’s fresh turkey and he’s not in a persnickety mood). That’s about it. He, ironically, eats a wider variety of food at school because he said he actually likes their cooking better than mine or The Spouse’s. He adores cafeteria food.

Tonight The Spouse and I were in the mood to make a simplified version of my grandmother’s paella, a very much modified chicken, chorizo and saffron rice concoction. But then I remembered that The Youngest Boy hadn’t eaten a decent dinner in days. Last night he turned his nose up at the two entree choices — homemade corn chowder and a store-made chicken pot pie — and instead had cereal. The previous night, he took a pass on the steak, mashed potatoes, sliced apples, sliced cucumbers, store-bought though warmed croissants and teriyaki spinach/walnut dish. No, wait, he ate the apples, along with a bowl of cereal.

So instead of making what we wanted to eat, The Spouse and I made homemade chicken nuggets (with a recipe from one of the sneaky mom cookbooks), garlic/chicken couscous with accompanying white beans on the side, sliced cucumbers (The Girl, who’s also picky, WILL eat cucumbers), sliced apples and sauteed yellow squash. We thought we’d have a better chance of The Youngest Boy eating this particular meal because, at least once in the recent past, he said he liked my homemade chicken nuggets. It was not our night, however. Guess what he ate? Apples. And a single bean, a bite of a third of a single cucumber slice and a teeny, tiny chicken nugget piece. And only because we made him, after we endured a pleading melodrama for what seemed like a teeth-grinding eternity.

At least he drank two cups of milk.

Image credit: FunDraw.

Item #1: Lessons from the 1960s

Okay, I’ll admit it. I am obsessed with Mad Men. (I think some of my friends secretly cannot WAIT for the short Mad Men season to conclude so I’ll stop dropping Don and Betty Draper’s names into virtually every conversation, blog post and Tweet.)

Annnywaayy . . . this week, over on Mommy Tracked (note the new spelling of the site’s name), I wrote a column about how watching the show, set in the 1960s, has given me a new-found understanding of how women in my family were raised and the expectations which were instilled in them when they were grown women, some expectations which they never jettisoned, even long after the feminist movement went mainstream.

Watching Mad Men’s affluent, Grace Kelly look-alike at-home mom Betty Draper, newly married career gal Joan Holloway (who thinks she wants what Betty has, not realizing that Betty hates her life) and the single, aspiring careerist Peggy Olson interact with the 1960s world has consistently brought to my mind aunts, grandmothers and sometimes my mother and has helped me look at their viewpoints with a whole heck of a lot less judgement than I used to.

Item #2: Family Dinners

Also on Mommy Tracked this week is a piece by Abby Margolis Newman, a mother of five (including two teens and one tween), who challenged the notion advanced in a New York Times article (and elsewhere) that families who are interested in keeping their kids off drugs, unpregnant, engaged in school and not off toting a rifle under a trench coat someplace should strive to have family meals together at least five times a week.

She wrote: “. . . [The] National Center on Addition and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA) also shows that ‘teenagers who eat with their families less than three times a week times a week are more likely to turn to alcohol, tobacco and drugs than those who dine with their families five times a week.’”

Given her family’s hyper-busy schedule and that her husband doesn’t get home until after 7:30 p.m., Margolis Newman said that even eating together three times a week is a stretch:

“The boys are at three different schools and are involved in sports and theatrical productions. This situation, needless to say, is not conducive to cozy family dinners during the week. Frankly, we’re lucky if we even get one sit-down dinner per week — and I mean at the table . . .

So, if my teenage and pre-teen boys get only one family dinner per week, does this mean they are five times as likely to turn to alcohol, tobacco and drugs? Holy crap. And do the chances of this bad behavior go up even higher if I, as the stay-at-home parent, do not actually do any home cooking but rather buy the pre-marinated chicken breasts, the frozen (but organic!) oven fries, and never vary our vegetable choices? Does eating In n’ Out burgers in the car on the way to or from baseball practice — as long as the boys are all together — count as a family meal (is there such a thing as partial credit)?”

Does your family eat dinner together at least five times a week?

Item #3: Reality Check Survey (Please Chime in Below in Comments Section!)

Statements directed at me by my children since school began:

“Everyone else on my soccer team has a cell phone but me.”

“My friend Matt can watch as much TV as he wants . . . No, his mother doesn’t stop him . . . No! Really! She doesn’t!”

“I’m the ONLY one in my class whose mom makes him pick up after the dog.”

I’ve been told all manner of tall tales by the kids — specifically my fifth graders — about what other kids’ parents are or are not allowing their children to do. Not that what other parents do or don’t do is going to change my opinion that my rugrats do not need cell phones at this time. And no matter what other parents report, I’m not putting a TV or a computer in their bedrooms any time soon. (To do so would result in my children watching TV until their eyes bleed.) And if they’re going to use the internet, it’s going to be in a public area (our kitchen, family room, etc.) so I can walk by to glance at what they’re doing. (I’ve already been asked, “If you type in ‘naked butts dot com’ into the internet what will you get?”) 

With all the smack that goes on in their school hallways (talk which prompted one of my kids to ask me to define “pole dancer” because this child heard kids joking about the subject in the hall), I wanted to do my own investigating and find out what other folks really are or aren’t doing with regard to cell phones, TVs, computers and family dog care.

Here’s where you, my smart readers come in. I would love to hear your answers to the following five questions:

1. How old is your kid(s)?

2. Does your kid(s) have a cell phone? If so, at what age did the kid(s) get it?

3. Does your kid(s) have unlimited TV watching time?

4. Unlimited computer and video game time?

5. If you have a family dog, is your kid(s) ever expected to clean up after the dog?

Please feel free to post your answers to my Reality Check Survey in the comments section below, or, if you’d prefer, e-mail me at: meredithobrien@hotmail.com.

Looking forward to reading your answers.

Image credit: AMC.

When I first started blogging in 2005, I dedicated an entry to something called, “Dysfunctional Family Bingo,” a term coined by a Brookline, MA psychologist in 2000 who was trying to come up with a funny way to cope with the inevitable madness that occurs during big holiday dinners.

I completely adore the concept.

Dysfunctional Family Bingo is like a regular Bingo game, except that the squares are filled with crazy things that could happen during a holiday dinner (there’s an ugly argument over politics, your kid breaks a family heirloom that was put in the middle of the coffee table, someone gets food poisoning, etc.). The idea is that you and your snarky friends print out the cards and secretly play along during a holiday event, like Thanksgiving. If one poor soul gets “Bingo” by unfortunately experiencing enough outrageous moments to win, that person calls the others and earns the group’s sympathy and perhaps earns a free drink the following week when you all get together to tell Thanksgiving dinner tales.

It’s a subversive way to recognize that there’s no such thing as a “perfect” holiday dinner, no matter what Martha Stewart may tell you. Everybody’s got some loony story to tell.

So in honor of Thanksgiving and the stress that sometimes accompanies big family dinners — whether or not you’re hosting — I’ve made up a 2008 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card.  If you’re expecting a particularly stressful Thanksgiving dinner this week, print it out and play along. Hopefully you won’t win.

See my 2008 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card here.

Got any Thanksgiving horror stories of your own that you want to share with the class? Please post your story (or stories) in the comments section below. And remember, in the words of the immortal High School Musical folks . . . ”We’re all in this together.”

Image credit: Meredith O’Brien/Picket Fence Post.