What do you do when one week they say “Ooo yummy, is there any more?” to your bolognaise sauce, and the next week they say “Yuck, it’s disgusting, I’m not eating that” to the very same concoction of ingredients done in pretty much the same order as the week before.
Is it something in the air?
I think yesterday it may have had something to do with the Polos they’d eaten before tea.
I did warn them.
I said “Stop eating polos or your tea will taste strange.”
But they took as much notice as they normally do. None.
At the table, after half an hour of fairly pleasant reminders that cucumber, red pepper and carrot sticks are not enough to keep a child’s metabolism running on high, I got heavy.
“If you don’t eat a reasonable amount of your pasta and sauce, within the next ten minutes, there’ll be no pudding, no bedtime stories and maybe even no telly on Saturday.”
“Why have you suddenly got so cross?” asks Ben.
“Because I’ve been sitting here, finished with my meal for twenty minutes, and I’m beginning to lose the plot. I hate teatime.”
I’m sounding like a two-year old myself, but arguments at mealtimes just do that to me.
If I hadn’t endured months of arguments, Ben wouldn’t even be eating sausages, but now he asks for them whenever we didn’t have them yesterday.
He still won’t eat:-
So providing varied and nutritious food for him is no picnic. Usually I give up on the varied bit and offer up the same stuff, alternating every three or four days in the hope that one day he’ll say –
“Do you know what Mum? I’m a bit sick of broccoli and cucumber and raw carrots. Can I have some spinach and asparagus and brussel sprouts today please?”
Yeah, like one day Hannah will say –
“Mummy I don’t like pink any more. I want to give away all my Barbie clothes and buy some Goth gear. This is the last time you’ll see me smile for the next four years.”
I think I’d prefer putrid pink any day.
As for yesterday’s teatime – Hannah ate most of hers, but Ben opted to leave the table hungry, forgoing pudding and Saturday morning telly.
He still got a bedtime story.
You’re suffering aren’t you, Beta Mum! I had that happen when my daughter discovered that Bolognaise had tomatoes in it. Good raw vegetable intake though…
Consistency never was my children’s forte either! I think if you can get your kids to eat any vegetables you’re probably doing better than many! Next time, just remember the (true) story of the thirteen year old boy who made the news because he’d been raised purely on jam sandwiches. And they were made with white bread!
Looks perfectly tasty to me, judging by the photo. Take heart – at least you’re past the stage where they flick it at you, as happened to me this evening. I have an entire freezer full of boxes of food daughter won’t eat. Sometimes I despair. I work so hard to make the stuff, then she won’t take a mouthful. SO frustrating. My current solution is to wheel out the Petit Filous fromage frais. She likes that so much she’ll even feed herself. Goodness, I thought all the meal-time trauma would disappear as daughter got older, now I can see it what lies ahead…
I think not worrying too much about it is the only way forward. I’m afraid I have given up on anything with more than five ingredients because you can guarantee that one will only eat it with half the ingredients removed, one with the other half removed, and the third will make gagging noises and hold her own nose as she gamely forces an amount you could fit on the head of a pin down her throat. It’s all very lowering.
I must admit I find the whole food/meal issue simply soul destroying. This is the one thing that genuinely makes me want to leave home.
I go through phases of trying to starve them into submission but it’s always me who gives in after several evenings of lovingly prepared uneaten meals.
SAHD – I had to fudge the issue of pigs in sausages for a while.
WM – I vaguely remember that story, and he didn’t look too bad on it.
MatL – I found it easier when they were babies, then harder when they started eliminating previously favourite foods from their diet one by one, just to se if they could. If you let them get away with it then, it’s much harder to get them eating the stuff again later on.
OM – I try not to put much time into anything I make for them, otherwise my fury at their rejection would be exponentially greater.
DM – If someone would descend every day at 5.30 to take over for an hour, I would have their babies, thereby giving myself many more years of fraught teatimes.
Clara – Ben will often choose no food over the food on offer. But he’s no more compliant the next day, just extra hungry for breakfast.