Eating

I have many friends who feed them children healthy and organic meals almost exclusively. Sometimes I feel bad that I'm not like that. But not often.

You see, having been raised on healthy, homemade, good for you food, and not allowed to have candy (except for halloween) or really anything processed (we had ice-cream for dessert from time to time), my adult life has been full of cravings for fruit loops, snickers bars, and artificially flavored food. The more fake tasting, the better. I mean, who would want a home made berry crumble (a favorite dessert at Chez Martin) when one can eat some sort of processed, high fructose corn syrupy thing instead?

So my goal with the kids has been to provide a range of food from very healthy to not so healthy. My hope is that treats are more part of the "norm" rather than the exception and they aren't craved as much, since they are not forbidden. Now, sure I tend to go overboard on this rule more often than not, but since so far (knock on wood) none of my kids are over weight or even close to it and their teeth are still free of cavities, I'm not worrying about it all very much. The kids and I recently had a discussion about the difference between healthy food and unhealthy food. They got the most obvious ones when quizzed, but were a bit confused with regard to pasta, waffles, and peanut butter, which is reasonable as they are confusing. I tried to focus on "moderation", but I'm sure it will be a conversation we repeat a lot.

Today, after school, it was raining and the kids were tired, so I plopped them in front of the tv to have a picnic snack. I never understood people that watched tv while eating, but who can resist a snack on a blanket while watching the Magic School Bus?




Anyway, I put out four bowls for them to share: Pretzels and peanut butter, goldfish crackers, tangerine slices, and trail mix. The trail mix, left over from the snow trip had raisins, nuts, carob covered things, and generic m and m's. I even gave a second thought to the trail mix since it seemed pretty silly a thing to put out.

Guess what the first thing the kids requested seconds of? The one that got eaten first and fast?

Tangerines!

Yay, my experiment impacting the overall health of my children paid off! At least today. Right now. Until later when they start complaining about the lack of dessert...