My daughter refuses to eat vegetables. This is karma, working its way into our home. I had it too easy the first time around. My son, a voracious eater, had many different nicknames as a baby, often revolving around the massive hovering of food, of any type or texture. I began to think of him as a handy human garburator, who would gladly eat leftover whatever mixed in with pasta and a few peas. I would smile at my friends who claimed their kids wouldn’t eat vegetables. “Oh, yeah, we don’t have that problem.” I’d say, stupidly. I hope I wasn’t too smug. My blissful Buddha “I’ll eat anything” baby days are over.
The second child, Miss Mae, refuses anything of the green variety. She can taste a veggie carefully hidden inside a sauce, and work her way around the rest of the food in her mouth, artfully spitting it out where it lands with a plop in the pocket of her bib. She also stores all other things she doesn’t like there, as I have discovered. “Look! She ate her cucumber!” I gleefully exclaimed to my husband. But during some miniscule distraction (phone ringing, cat throwing up, other child rolling his tongue into a u and seeing if he can shoot food out of it) I missed her artful dodging and piling into the oft used pocket.
She will eat “veggie booty”. You know, the “natural” junk food that looks and tastes like Styrofoam, only with kale. I reconcile myself to the fact that even though the amount of kale is akin to a powdery residue, if she eats enough of it, she will be eating kale. I tell myself this every time I am pushing her in the pram and she is voraciously ramming it into her mouth, to the horror stricken look of other mothers. I see their raised eyebrows, as they wonder how I can feed my baby piles of green popcorn.
Well, I can, and I will. I tried at first, to be a good mom. I pureed organic squash and made a zillion ice cubes of food pyramid wonders. Now, I ask the baby if “she’d like a little bit of hot dog?” I recall the Simpson’s episode where Lisa becomes a Vegetarian, after visiting a hot dog factory. God only knows what goes into hot dogs, yet I have broken down. I don’t even feel guilt about it. I can reconcile anything with a “everything in moderation” and not even break a sweat.
I know I shouldn’t worry; she’ll do as we do eventually. Unless this is the beginning of a beautiful mother-daughter “I won’t do it if you tell me to” relationship. If it comes to that, I will be soon be eating many of my vegetables out of a Bloody Mary. After all, everything in moderation…
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Thanks for the laugh! My son won’t eat any vegetables but carrots. I even broke down and bought that cookbook by Jerry Seinfeld’s wife about hiding vegetables in other food. It would have worked except that my son is such a picker eater that he won’t even eat half those foods, even if I left out the hidden vegetables. Hear hear to the Bloody Mary!