Snakes, Snails and Puppy Dog Tales: An Apple a Day

“Hand me a couple of curved pieces, would you, honey?” I asked him. My five-year-old and I were building a train track together on the floor of the room he shares with his big brother.

Nothing.

I looked up and saw him watching me, pensively.

He said, “So-and-so says ‘your mom doesn’t pack healthy lunches.’ ”

“Oh, is that so?” hackles rising immediately; this is kind of a sore subject.

“Yeah...”

“Well, what does he bring for lunch?” feeling inadequate, imagining all of the culinary delights that So-and-so’s mommy serves up.

“Fruit.”

“Oh. Well. What would you do if I put fruit in your lunch box?”

“Bleahhhhhh!” with an exaggerated hands-to-throat gagging gesture.

“Right. So that’s why I don’t do it.”

He smiled at me and handed me the two curved pieces of track, as if that made all the sense in the world.

And it does to me – I have more control over plate waste if it happens at home.

“He doesn’t see what you eat the rest of the time.” No doubt he wouldn’t be impressed, but was I really worried about what some other five-year-old thought about my son’s lunch?

I continued, “It’s really hard for me to make lunch for you, honey. You’re very…uhm…selective.”

In fact, getting that kid to eat anything other than cereal with milk these days is one of my biggest challenges.

I don’t know how he became so hard to please! As a baby, he consumed anything I offered him – with great gusto. I have pictures of him eating berries we’d picked on the rail trail, raisins, peas, and pasta with red sauce – all things he won’t touch today. There was one of him drinking a breakfast shake with a “Got Milk?” grin on his face. The pièce de résistance was a photo of him at six months old, gnawing on a beef rib bone. “Who’s that baby!?” he wondered, as we looked through the photos together.

It’s not that he hasn’t been exposed to the things most other kids eat. I’ve insulted him with hamburgers, hot dogs, macaroni and cheese, SpaghettiO’s, several kinds of sandwiches – all of which repelled him, as garlic would a vampire. He insists he’s allergic to peanut butter, which he is not, and survived on jelly sandwiches on white bread at Grotonwood all summer last year.

Currently his dietary staples – besides cereal and a limited sampling of other breakfast foods – include one or two kinds of pizza: Mystic and “mini-Mystic” (which is really just store-brand pizza made more desirable by my made up moniker, chicken nuggets, and fish sticks. He only recently resumed eating potato products. The choice du jour is shoestring fries, which is at least a delivery method for ketchup. While definitely not a vegetable, ketchup is at least good source of the anti-oxidant lycopene.

Then, and only because I won’t allow “treat” unless he has fulfilled this requirement – he eats…drum roll, please…an apple. After all, an apple a day keeps the doctor away!

(And yes, I am aware that the experts say it’s not a good idea to bribe children with food. Those experts have an open invitation to dinner at my house.)