Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Solution: set up a trough on the patio

Still working on the "no grains" thing. Thank you for all the ideas and suggestions! We went a few days with no grains whatsoever, and it worked out pretty well. The other evening, I made mini spinach quiches for supper, called them "cheese muffins," and the kids ate them like they were fruit pizzas stuffed with chocolate and cocaine. As one of you lovely people so succinctly put it, "Idiots." Even the wiliest of children can be really, really dumb.

Here's the deal. It's not that I eat too much bread or grains, or even that I plan to feed them to the kids often. It's that two kids this small require a lot of attention during meals. Even Grace, who can finally operate a fork in a manner approaching that of a semi-dexterous drunk monkey, needs assistance in cutting up food and figuring out how a napkin works.

So, pretty much all day long--aside from naptimes--, I am either preparing food, helping the kids feed themselves food, cleaning up after food time, or figuring out what food to start preparing again in five minutes. By the end of lunch, after I've been up to my elbows in food-related chores all day, and all I want to do is stick them in bed and lie on the couch with a box of wine for the duration of naptime, I'm really not feeling up to preparing yet more food when they run out. So they often just get a piece of bread tossed in their general direction. Some days they barely touch their lunches, which is fine. But other days they tear through them in a manner reminiscent of Taz in a rage.

This is where the over reliance on bread comes in, and this is why I want to have foods that I can prepare in advance that don't need to be refrigerated (because by that point in the day, they've already hit their fruit quota, and we don't have a billion dollars a week to spend on bananas and grapes).

I finally unearthed a recipe for dry roasted green peas that I will try as soon as the bag I found and bought at a farmer's market runs out. The Child tried them, declared them "Mmm. This is good!" and has refused to touch them since. But Emmy thinks they're God's gift to little fat toddlers, and nearly bursts a blood vessel every time I get the bag out.

So I'll start making them regularly. Grace can just not have snacks if she refuses to eat them.

1 comment:

  1. The dry roasted peas sound pretty good! Care to share the recipe? I'm not sure if my kids would go for it, but I might give it a try. My kids basically snack on fruit all day, but it's expensive, and vegetables would be good for them, too. I do put some carrots in their snack compartment and they like those, and J likes cucumbers and lettuce, but they're not very adventuresome with veggies.

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