My children won’t eat anything. Okay, that’s not entirely true. My daughter will eat lasagna, my oldest son will eat cucumbers, my second son will eat oranges, and my 21-month-old will eat grapes. But trying to get them all to agree on one meal that isn’t pizza or some other item of questionable nutrition is a challenge.
It’s frustrating to me as a parent because I know how important good nutrition is. My husband is an alternative health care practitioner and he cares how the children eat as well. We’ve both lost large chunks of hair at dinner time when one child after another announces, “I don’t like it.”
Now don’t get me wrong – I don’t put up with that. If they don’t eat what I make for dinner, they can just wait until the next meal rolls around. But they miss out on so many important nutrients when they won’t eat. These are the years when they should be getting as many minerals and vitamins as they can.
So I’ve turned to cookbooks. I picked up a whole pile of them at our local thrift store, ranging in price from a quarter to $2.00, and found some recipes in there I think we can agree on. I particularly like the ones with pictures. I have the younger children sit down and look through the books, pointing at the pictures of the foods they think they’d like to try. The older kids can read the ingredients, and then we compromise. If this meal has green peppers in it, and they say they don’t want green peppers, we can leave those out and substitute them for something else.
I particularly like online recipe sites. I spent probably an hour and a half on allrecipes.com the other night, e-mailing myself the Asian recipes. And I’ve noticed there’s a pretty good collection right here on familes.com. My project for this next weekend will be to download all the recipes from our very own bloggers.
Who knows – maybe I’ll end up with some foods that will satisfy both my need for nutrition and my children’s need for tasty. And yes, you guessed it, another great reason to read!
Related Blogs:
Book Review: Meal Time and Sleep Solutions
Sneaky Mama’s Top 9 Tips for Picky Eaters