Dairy Delight

Dealing with a picky eater is challenging. Dealing with a kid who refuses to range beyond his half dozen core foods is exhausting. Every time we leave the house for an extended amount of time we have to pack a full meal for our 3-year-old Little Dude. Needless to say, I can now boil pasta in my sleep. And given our current exhaustion level with a newborn in the house, I often do.  

He would eat pancakes 3 times a day, if given the chance.

So as a parent who has dealt with this for 3+ years, one ongoing concern is how he will get his protein, since he flat-out refuses the protein staples most kids eat: chicken nuggets, hamburgers, pizza, etc. He eats a variety of fruits and even some vegetables, which is great, but protein is such an essential item to have throughout the day for energy.

He has an affinity for hot dogs, but I try not to overdo those even though I buy the nitrate-free ones. I’ve tried cheese, both grilled on buttery bread and fresh from the fridge in slices, strings and cubes and he won’t touch them. I’ve tried bribery and not even the allure of new Hot Wheels is enticing enough to make him give any of these things a shot. As though pizza is such an awful thing.

But there is one thing that really whets his whistle. It’s probably the only thing that I can order him virtually anywhere and he’ll actually consume it. Good old fashioned milk.  You always hear the old wives tales about how “milk is good for your bones”. It turns out that old wives are actually pretty accurate sometimes.  I recently discovered that an 8oz glass has 8 grams of protein, which is not too shabby.

I know the feeling...

Since he started preschool in the fall, the Little Dude burns a lot more energy in the mornings than he used to. There are a lot of days when he’ll come home from school and literally lay prone on the floor because he’s so wiped out. I never knew watercolors could be so exhausting, but I believe Picasso was a tired Dude, too.

So when he needs a pick-me-up in the afternoon, I hand him one of his trusty Cars cups filled with the white creamy goodness that only comes from a cow. That tides him over for the afternoon until dinnertime, when his pickiness resumes. It also gives him the energy to get outside and play. I hope that if he drinks enough milk, he’ll soon be able to start training for the 2028 Olympics because given how he sometimes plays with his stuffed animals I think he’d be a good shot putter. So I’m thankful for the vitamins and nine essential nutrients that I know will help him grow big and strong. And thankful for milk, because I don’t know any other natural way he’d willingly get them.  

Milk tastes better when served by Lightning McQueen

Given how important milk is to my children’s growth, I’m teaming up with the “got milk?” Campaign and Fuel Up to Play 60 for the Breakfast Blitz program to help provide $250,000 in grants to local schools across the country to help give kids greater access to a healthy breakfast. Now through Feb. 17, when you buy milk you can vote to have a portion go to a local school.

If you don’t already know, Fuel Up to Play 60 is a great in-school program designed to show students how to eat right and stay active. I know firsthand that choosing healthy foods and leading an active lifestyle gives me and my family the energy to do the things we love.

Want to learn more about the wonderful benefits of milk? Check out:

·  Sweeps page: MilkMustache.com

·  Hashtag: #BfastBlitz

·  FUTP: http://www.fueluptoplay60.com/

·  Facebook: Milk Mustache Campaign

·  Twitter: @MilkMustache

·  Pinterest: Milk Mustache Campaign

·  Instagram: Milk Mustache

I wrote this post while participating in the got milk? FUTP60/Breakfast Blitz Promotion and was compensated, though the opinions expressed are entirely 163% mine. For better or worse. 

The Evil Child

At the recent birthday party of one of the Little Dude’s friends, I learned that some kids are just pure evil. And I didn’t know how to handle it.

Like the majority of parties we’ve gone to over the last few years this one was at an “indoor play place”. If you are a parent of young kids, you probably know the type: a very brightly fluorescent lit room filled with primary colors and runny-nosed kids. And some toys.  

Some kids are better sharers than others. My Little Dude happens to be an excellent sharer and I’m not just saying that because he’s my kid. In the interest of full disclosure, my son is a Thomas the Train addict and every time he goes to a place with a train table, he usually spends the majority of his time there. He likes to carry the trains around as he checks out the table, sometimes six or eight trains at a time.  But whenever another kid comes to play, he shares what he’s holding.

At this particular party, after the requisite cheese pizza and sheet-cake, the kids had free play time. The Little Dude spotted a Razor-type scooter and was enamored by it, despite never having been on one before. I watched him as he watched some of the older kids riding and knew he wanted to try it out.

He followed one boy who rode the scooter to the back of the playroom. The boy stepped off the scooter and laid it on the ground nearby as he went to play air hockey with another kid. Clearly he was moving on to something else, as kids tend to do frequently at places like this that offer myriad opportunities for play.  The Little Dude spotted the scooter on the ground from about 25 feet away and eagerly started running toward it. As he was getting close, the other boy noticed him, turned around and stuck his leg out. My Little Dude crashed to the carpet.

The boy, who was at least double my son’s age, looked proud of himself. “Ha, I tricked that little kid”, his face screamed. Until he noticed me watching.  I ran to my son, who was shaken up and confused. Probably more shocked by his fall than anything, he was clearly upset.  At 2 ½ he was too young to verbalize what he was thinking, but the sadness on his face which had radiated pure excitement 20 seconds earlier was heartbreaking.

I turned to the boy and asked him why he did that. He had no response. After a few carefully chosen words from me, which he shrugged off, he turned back to his air hockey game. We took the scooter and headed in the other direction. I was baffled. I’d seen kids play rough before, but never so blatantly toward my kid.

The tricky part of the situation was that I know Evil Boy’s parents. Not well at all, but extremely casually.  I don’t know them well enough to know whether this was his usual behavior or an isolated incident. I looked around and saw the parents on the other side of the room, not watching what any of their kids were doing.  I made sure my son was OK and as expected, within a couple minutes he lost interest in the scooter and headed back to see Thomas, Percy and company. He was over the incident. I was not.

I was faced with the dilemma of whether or not to say something to the obviously inattentive parents.  I didn’t want to cause a scene at someone else’s party, but the reality was, their kid acted like an A-hole. They needed to know. 

I debated various ways of broaching the subject with the parents. A few times I saw Evil Boy cross my path. Each time, I gave him a very stern look. And each time, I saw a nervous look on his face before he took off in the opposite direction.  If the kid and his family were strangers, it might have been easier. But they weren’t.

For half an hour, my mind raced. Would my confronting the parents lead to further confrontation? I knew that I didn’t want to cause a problem, but I was unhappy and they needed to know so that other kids wouldn’t fall victim to their son the bully.

As I debated internally, I watched my son playing with the trains. He had a chain of 3 going up and down bridges along the tracks & smiled each time they cruised down the hill. If he was already over it, maybe I should be too. I decided to not tell the parents.  Hopefully karma will someday.

What would you have done if you were in my position?

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Who Picked This Pickiness?

One of my first posts when I started this blog a year ago was about my frustration at having the pickiest eating toddler in the history of civilization.  Just like they do on TV about old shows no one has thought about in decades, I thought I’d do a “Where Are They Now?” look at, well, where we are now in regard to the diversity of the Little Dude’s palate.

Spoiler Alert: It still sucks.

I expected his picky eating to be a phase that he’d grow out of, as countless people assured me it would. I suppose there is still time for that to occur, since he’s only 2 ½ years old, but it seems like it never will. Especially when we are at kids’ birthday parties and the inevitable cheese pizza is served. Mine is the only kid who would rather eat a bag of Baked Snap Pea Crisps than that mozzarella-covered cardboard they often try to pass off as pizza.

Mandatory Kids' Birthday Party Meal

You might be thinking that it’s much better for him to eat baked vegetable snacks than greasy pizza, which is probably true health-wise. I often wonder about the social component of his pickiness. People have suggested that he’ll evolve when he is around other kids. Um, he’s sitting next to 20 other kids who are all eating pizza and he’s not. Must he go to Burning Man for a bigger crowd?

We are very lucky to have a happy, healthy boy who is consistently near the top of the growth chart, so I shouldn’t be complaining. But the frustration caused by his unwillingness to even taste certain foods is compounded by the fact that he frequently talks about them. Yes, my son is an E.T., an Eating Tease.  

Sometimes Mrs. Dude or I will ask what he wants to eat, though we know it’s really a rhetorical question since he eats the same 5 things every day. Occasionally he’ll surprise us and say he wants pizza, for example, and immediately qualifies his request with “for real!” to add validity.  So we make the pizza, put it in on his plate, and watch as once again he’d rather skip dinner than suffer through the horror of cheese baked on top of tomato sauce and dough.  And every time this happens I feel like Charlie Brown when Lucy pulls the football. Good grief. 

The Little Dude’s eating repertoire has been virtually the same for the last year and a half. He does have an affinity for breakfast food, but beyond that I’m running out of ideas.  This is the same kid who ate Kraft Macaroni & Cheese for dinner EVERY NIGHT for more than a year, and that only ended because we stopped giving it to him every night. Now the great majority of his evening meals are anchored by (Nitrate-Free) Turkey Dogs, aka the only type of “meat” that he’ll consider eating.

There is one exception to his edict of not trying new foods, and that is if he determines that an item is a cookie, cake, candy or other type of sweet. He can hone in on a dry-looking Do-Si-Do from 20 yards away even though he’s never seen one before but the thought of a dinosaur-shaped chicken nugget is torturous. How he developed that sixth sense, I’ll never understand.  

Double-fisting vanilla cones

People who know me well have suggested that this is my payback for behavior from 25-30 years ago. You see, I was a picky eater once, too. In fact, I ate the same lunch virtually every day from kindergarten through 6^th grade: peanut butter & jelly. I’ve broadened my horizon since then, but even at my pickiest stage I ate at least a few other items. I think I can count every item the Little Dude eats on my fingers and toes. And that’s including both Original and Honey Nut Cheerios.

So what should we do? As a parent, this is incredibly frustrating on so many levels.  We can’t go to a restaurant without packing a full meal, because the likelihood of him eating something from the menu is almost nil. Unless they serve hotdogs.  And even then, he won’t eat the French fries or carrots served with it.  He’d much rather eat a half-dozen Trader Joes rice cakes.  Maybe he has the right idea after all.

 How have you dealt with a picky eater?

Old Man at The Sea

Mrs. Dude and I started taking the Little Dude to the beach last summer when he was a year and a half old.  We wanted it to be a fun experience for our whole family.  It costs about a million dollars less than going to Disneyland, which is a good start.

The coast in LA is usually very overcast in the morning before the marine layer burns off. That’s a fancy way of saying it’s usually cold and gray until after noon, which perfectly describes our visit. As a result, the beach was nearly empty when we arrived.  

We picked a spot near the lifeguard tower, and then set up our blankets, coolers and toys.  The only thing missing was the sun. Fortunately we brought sweatshirts because it was a brisk 62 degrees out.  It felt like being sequestered with Ben and Jerry, or rather in one of their freezers.

We met the young stoner  lifeguard who was hanging out in the adjacent tower on one of our 87 trips up and down his ramp, which he didn’t seem to mind. Or he may have just been a little too dazed and confused to notice on this early Saturday morning.

After a while I noticed a group of 8 teenagers come in with a stack of 8 pizza boxes and set up camp about 75 feet away from us. There were a couple dorky guys who were shamelessly trying to impress the girls in the group.  I had to watch them to see if the kid who looked like a 95-pound String Bean with bad acne would be swept away by a strong gust of wind.

Also, with such a small group I wondered what the deal was with all the pizzas.

After a while, Mrs. Dude and my Little Dude were off exploring the water when I noticed one of the teen girls wearing jeans, boots and a hoodie, lying on the sand trying to get comfortable.  It wasn’t sunny out, so she wasn’t going to get tan even if she hadn’t been dressed for the Alaskan apocalypse. Her friends then covered her up with a blanket.  What were these dopes were up to?

Once she was fully covered, they started covering the blanket with slices of pizza. I think they wanted to see if the seagulls hovering nearby were lactose intolerant. Surprisingly, after a few minutes no birds came. Then I noticed the pizzas were from Domino’s, so I guess it shouldn’t have been a big surprise.

So the String Bean Kid decided to kick things up a notch. He started tossing slices. He was throwing toward the water and a slew of birds flocked toward the greasy slice of goopy cardboard he’d pitched. Since his splotchy face closely resembled his flying objects, he had to try harder to impress the girls who were busy reading their US Weeklys. What would he do?

Their group was about 75 feet away from us, parallel to the water. A few birds had landed between our blanket and theirs and were gnawing on some crust when String Bean decided to offer them another slice. So he reeled back and with all his might threw the slice toward them. He must have had a burst of adrenaline as the slice way overshot the birds and landed about 2 feet from me, right on my blanket.

Needless to say, I wasn’t thrilled. The teens all saw what happened. I think their first thought was “is this guy going to be cool or what?” The correct answer was “or what”.

I stared at String Bean who was frozen among his friends. I stood from my lounge chair, which is hard to look cool while doing, and sternly told him to come over. He started moving in my direction, but appeared to be taking his time, to show off for his friends. I told him that he better start running. His Marinara-face turned Alfredo-white as he moved double speed to my blanket, not sure what was going to happen when he arrived.

 

I ordered him to clean up his mess. His voice cracked as he nervously apologized. I think the fact that I was more than double his size and age may have caused him to wet himself. Fortunately he was wearing a bathing suit which provided good water retention.

My gaze turned back to his group. I saw his friends laughing at him as he moped back toward them.  His fantasy of impressing the girls likely squelched for that day. I smirked to myself, before a realization hit me. In an instant I had turned into every grumpy old man from every movie ever. All this time I’ve thought I was a fun young Dude. But today I became the Old Man at the Sea.  

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Another Birthday

Today is my birthday. In lieu of gifts, please just send cash*. Birthdays have always been a weird day to me.  Growing up in the Midwest and having a birthday mid-November, as a kid I always associated my birthday with the first snow of the season. Maybe that’s why I hate snow. As for birthdays, my opinion is mixed.   

I always wanted to have a summer birthday so that I could be outside or have a pool party or, best case scenario: a pool party outside unlike the indoor pool party I had one year. Like most Midwesterners we went to a community pool where on any given day you could see little kids force grownups to wait around for hours while a miserable teenager cleaned out the Baby Ruth filled water.  OK, maybe that wouldn’t have been so fun after all.  

Instead of a bathing suit I usually got to bundle up in a sweater, moonboots, scarf, hat, and snow jacket to go to my birthday parties.  By the way, some people might call it a ski jacket but along with my dislike of snow comes an inherent aversion to going really fast down a slippery incline while it’s 14 degrees out. Surprisingly, the potential for broken bones and/or maiming doesn’t entice me much either.

I usually got to celebrate my birthday at an exciting location like the Ground Round. The incredibly exciting attraction at that place was that you could eat peanuts and throw the shells on the floor while watching 50-year-old Three Stooges movies. Even as a kid I didn’t think they were funny.

Another local fiesta hot spot was Showbiz Pizza. If you aren’t familiar, Showbiz was where Chuck E. Cheese rejects got shipped for bad behavior. They had those same creepy animatronic creatures who sang while their heads swiveled no more than 45 degrees.  You also got the same crappy pizza as served by Senor E. Cheese. Then again, I don’t think kids under the age of 10 actually realize that any pizza is bad, even if it is literally just a piece of cardboard covered in ketchup and confetti.  At least they had Skee-ball. 

As an adult, birthday celebrations evolve. For several years after college I’d have a birthday dinner with five to twenty-five of my closest friends. You know these types of celebrations.  It usually consists of a bunch of people in an overly loud space with food that takes forever and the honoree somehow ends up stuck at the end of the table. There are overpriced cocktails and at the end of the meal there is major squabbling over the bill depending on which style of “Restaurant Math” is applied.

If you aren’t familiar, there are two primary formulas for calculating a bill when at a restaurant with a  large group.  The one certainty is that both ways irritate the majority of the group the majority of the time. 

The first is “Uneven Division”: this is when you divide the total bill by the number of people at the table.  As a result of this style the people who drink heavily usually come out way ahead of those who arrive late or only eat a salad or entrée.  The second style is “Remedial Adding”: when everyone chips in a certain amount of cash based on what they ate. Somehow this never works out and the pot usually ends up at least 30% short. Even though the bill is self explanatory, someone who ate only a salad ends up paying $50 to compensate for the drunk cheapskates in the group. 

BC was born 9 days before my birthday two years ago so that year my birthday was spent helping him get over the trauma from his Bris the day before. But otherwise for the last several years, I’ve mainly had quiet celebrations with my wife. Since she is a mathematics professional we have very little squabbling over the bill like the annoying situations I described above. On this night, I let her pay.

*= Or if you really want to be my friend, you can “Like” my Facebook or Twitter pages as a gift.  

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--JJ aka The Dude of the House

A Sticky Situation

Though I’m a big Dude, I have to admit there is a certain tiny object that I have an enormous phobia of.  As long as I can remember, I’ve had a fear of needles. It’s not something I have any control over but if I see a needle headed for my epidermis we’ve got problems.  

What kind of problems? Well, if I get too good of a view of the needle there’s a good chance I’ll start getting clammy hands. If the nurse doesn’t move fast enough, my forehead will begin to perspire. So on and so forth. It’s just not a good situation. It’s an involuntary reaction that is irreversible. Not that I have any real desire to start watching people get jabbed.

Over the last couple of years I’ve been exposed to many more needles than I ever anticipated.  It all started when SS got pregnant.  When we’d go for her monthly OB checkups, they always had to take her blood.  Blech. As her pregnancy progressed the doctor was concerned that the baby was going to be a giant like I was (as I wrote in “Can I see some ID?”) so there was a risk of gestational diabetes. Honestly, I think I was more at risk for gestational diabetes than SS was, given the amount of comfort food I ingested during that 9 month buffet of fun.  We had to go in three separate times for her to get tested for the diabetes. She passed every time.  If passing is not having it.  

I was very concerned before the delivery about the epidural SS was going to receive. We had a scheduled C-Section, so it was a matter of when it was going to be performed, not if.  My concern was two-fold. First, just the thought of her getting a needle inserted into her spine literally made me want to vomit.  Second, I thought I would have to be there by her side as it occurred.  I was relieved when the anesthesiologist told me that I had to wait in another room while she poked that silvery slice of pain relieving goodness into my wife’s back. But only because if I had been there with her, there’s a good chance I would have missed the delivery. Because I was passed out cold on the operating room floor.   

One of the most difficult things about being a parent is watching your child when he is in pain. I learned that quickly when literally moments after birth, the nurses started sticking, poking and prodding my son. And I said “my son” instead of BC because he didn’t even have an official name yet, that’s how fresh out of the oven he was.  

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been exposed to many more needles than I could ever imagine. Starting at two months old, BC started receiving his immunizations at the pediatrician’s office.  I have to admit, his reaction to the shots has been as good as they could be.  Every single time he’s cried for 30 seconds or less and that was it.  Obviously we know where that calmness comes from and I’ll be the first to admit it’s not from me.  

This might all date back to a traumatic incident from my childhood. At my first visit with a new pediatrician, when it was time for my annual booster shot I refused. Surprisingly the doctor said that he would wait until I was ready. I assumed he meant a minute or two. Then he got up and left the room.  And made me wait for an hour.  My mother was not happy.  With the doctor who acted like a jerk. So when he came back and asked if I was ready, I decided to spite him and said no. So I had to wait another half hour.  And this was before the advent of Angry Birds. Finally my mother convinced me to just get it over with and that was the last time I saw that (idiot) doctor.  His bad attitude made me want to stick a needle in his…tires. 

Shortly after BC’s birth, something unexpected happened.  The pediatrician told SS & me that we needed some shots, too.   My Little Dude was born during the Swine Flu epidemic in 2009 and you probably recall that it was very communicable.   For his safety, we needed to get the Swine Flu vaccine, the regular Flu vaccine and the TDAP vaccine.  That was more shots than I’d had in years. Intentionally.

But now the pressure was on. If I refused, I would possibly be putting my newborn at risk if I came into contact with a sick friend or a large meat lover’s pizza.  We told the doctor that we’d do it. For SS, it was obviously no big deal given her recent history as a pin cushion. So I let her go first.  Have you ever noticed how fast those pediatric nurses maneuver? They’re like snipers protecting the president.  

Before I could even debate the issue in my head, it was my turn.  My mind was racing: should I back down and put BC at risk or face the humiliation of nervosity caused by a small piece of metal? I could feel my palms moisten.  And as I tried to come up with a good reason not to do it, my newly installed parental instinct kicked in and I acquiesced.  I got the two flu vaccines, one in each arm. The nurse then covered the wounds with SpongeBob band-aids, which I must admit looked mighty impressive on my bulging biceps.  

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--JJ aka The Dude of the House