When my brother was two, my mother asked our pediatrician how she could get him to eat more foods. The doctor said, “Well, what does he eat?”
My mother said, “He won’t eat anything but hot dogs, orange juice, and Hershey bars.”
The doctor said, “Eh, don’t worry about it. That’s not so bad, and if you fight him about it, he’ll dig in his heels longer. Just don’t let him eat more than one candy bar a day.”
Now, you may take issue with that, and to me, a Hershey bar a day does sound like a lot for a small child. But it worked, because now my brother eats Thai food.
Baguette likes hot dogs just fine. Pizza, too. But her current favorite is macaroni and cheese.
She wants it all the time. Yesterday morning she woke up early, so she had breakfast at home. I put her usual scrambled egg in front of her, and she looked at me and said, hopefully, “Macaroni and cheese.”
I said, “I’d like you to eat your egg first.”
She said, “Nooooo! Macaroni and cheese!”
On the plus side, she’s not picky about some aspects of it. I want to make it from scratch, but I don’t always have time. And she doesn’t care whether it’s homemade or Kraft. So sometimes I succumb to the lure of simplicity and speed–but then the next round is homemade.
On the negative side, she is picky about other aspects. Last week I made it from scratch and added pureed butternut squash (Is sneaking vegetables into dishes good or bad? I don’t care–I’m doing it.) No, that’s not what she cared about. The problem was that in what was clearly a fit of insanity, I purchased a box of bow tie pasta.
In my defense, I thought she’d think it was fun.
I know, I know. The outcome was totally predictable. She asked for macaroni and cheese, and I placed a bowl of my lovingly crafted meal in front of her, and she instantly screamed, “Noooooo! Macaroni and cheese.”
I tried, but there was no reasoning with her. And in her defense, that wasn’t macaroni and cheese. It was bowtie pasta with cheese.