It’s Easter, and this means that it took my daughter an hour and a half to go to sleep last night. This is by no means due to her chocolate intake, of course. She had two Easter egg hunts and a special family dinner yesterday, and the chocolate threshold was quite high. Thank goodness for our special smoothies in the morning, or I suspect that her vegetable tally would have been close to zero yesterday. Chocolate is a vegetable, isn’t it? It comes from the cacao tree.
Now, I have nothing against chocolate. It does contain sugar and it does keep my daughter awake due to the caffeine content. However, it also contains antioxidants, and those aren’t a bad thing. However, I do try to be moderate about our chocolate intake. We actually have a chocolate day in our house. On Tuesdays when we get groceries, we also get one lovely organic chocolate bar, hazelnut-flavored usually. We eat it all that afternoon, and that’s it for the week. No more whining for chocolate allowed, not from my daughter, not from me. Without this dose of moderation we are both liable to think about chocolate every waking moment.
We also have dessert nights in our house. Twice a week I make dessert, and other nights we leave it alone. It makes dinner time preparation a lot simpler to avoid dessert, and I find that my daughter eats more dinner if she knows that is it: there’s no extra course after the meal.
I believe in moderation, and moderation in sweets is something that I find challenging. I’ve set up our routines for me as well as for my daughter, to keep the whole family healthy. If we eat a small number of sweet treats throughout the week, I find that keeps the cravings down and gives us things to look forward to, but it also encourages healthy eating overall. Do you have rules and routines about sweet treats in your house?
(Image courtesy of nkzs at stock exchange)