Picket Fence Post

Jan Eliot’s Stone Soup comic has a tendency to strangely reflect some aspect of what’s going on in my house at any given moment. It’s really starting to freak me out a little.

Take this week’s subject: The two grade-school aged girls — whose favorite pastime is mocking their mom’s lack of expertise in the domestic arena – have been forced to pick up the slack when it came to the laundry and preparing dinner, since their single (widowed) mom’s busy working and their grandmother, who had helped out around the house, is on an extended trip. The girls are finally going to get a taste of what it’s like to tackle the mundane and unglorified tasks of running a household. (I’ll bet the tuna surprise they’ve been making in the last two comic strips, with marshmallows and chocolate malted milk balls, will certainly surprise them when they dig into it. My hope is that, if they ruin the laundry and the dinner, that they’ll have a bit more respect for what their mom does for them. But maybe that’s just wishful thinking.

In the Picket Fence Post household, I’ve been trying to get the three kids (8, 11, 11) to be more comfortable with making meals as a way to help out. They prepare their own breakfasts on many school days — The Girl is confident enough to make pancakes and egg dishes — and they’re able to put together school lunches, though The Eldest Boy’s usually too slow moving in the mornings to prepare his lunch. The Spouse has also been trying to get them accustomed to doing the laundry and folding it.

Unfortunately, none of this has prevented The Ungratefuls from routinely kvetching about the dinners I make them. (Actually, that’s not fair. The Eldest Boy doesn’t usually complain and is a very good eater. One out of three ain’t bad I suppose.) However The Youngest Boy will drop to the kitchen floor and roll around in a fury, I’d estimate, roughly, 80 percent of the time when I inform him what I’m making for dinner. The Girl’s technique is to sit at the dinner table and eat nothing, fighting furiously with us if we try to coax her into taking just a bite out of dinner. (Last night, we had words when I tried to convince her to take a bite of the barbecued chicken, long grain rice and the baked butternut squash with pecans and brown sugar I’d prepared. You’d think I was trying to get her to eat beets or chicken livers.)

As of late, I’ve been declining to answer the question, “What’s for dinner?” I leave them on their own to deduce what I’m making, commence with their requisite griping and prepare for a bowl full of cereal for dinner.

Maybe it’ll work out better for the mom in Stone Soup.

Do your kids help out with laundry, making meals or other household chores?

Image credit: Stone Soup via Go Comics.

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.