New Year, New Plan!!
This past year, Kid has decided he wants to be less picky. (YAY!!) He doesn’t like the attention and questions he gets when eating away from home. He’s very polite about it… will eat a few bites of things, but usually comes home hungry. I’ve been super lazy with cooking this past year, too. I started a new business (Clingks.com) and have resorted to making lots of processed & packaged foods (which he LOVES).
Combining his desire to be less picky and my desire to be more healthy, we have come up with a plan together that I, for one, am very excited about! We’ve just completed week one and it has gone well enough for me to share out loud. 🙂
Here’s the plan:
Rule #1. No more separate meals for dinner. BUT, breakfast and lunch he gets to choose. Plenty of people will try to claim that never making separate meals is what ‘cured’ or even ‘prevented’ their kids from becoming picky eaters, but they’re lying. If it worked, they didn’t have picky eaters in the first place. I tried that years ago when he first started eating table food, remember? The kid didn’t eat for 3 days. No, the key here is balance. Separate meals for breakfast and lunch so he will eat at least 2 meals a day. Plus, we don’t even eat breakfast and lunch together anyway, so I’d be making those meals separately regardless. But when dinner comes around, I’m only making one meal for the both of us. (Chef is at work, so not eating with us till the weekends.) One meal, one mess, more creativity.
Rule #2. He needs to eat 3 bites of everything on his plate. If he doesn’t like anything after the 3 bites, he can have a bowl of fruit. (Which, yes, is still kind of a separate meal, but he can get it himself, so I’m not making it.)
Rule #3. Friday night is still pizza night, so he’s not missing that. This is the night that Chef is usually home and makes something ‘foodie’ just for us, so nobody wants this night to change. 🙂
Rule #4. I promised that one meal a week would be the processed food he likes, and that I would have to eat it, too. (He knows I don’t like it, so I gotta show him that I’m willing to make sacrifices, too.) I try to do this on Wednesday, to break up the week a bit.
Sundays we often meet the grandparents out for dinner somewhere, and he can order whatever he likes at a restaurant. So really, he’s only changing 4 meals a week. This felt very attainable to him, and surprisingly liberating for me!
The goal is more exposure and experimentation. I’ve been trying these things all along, but finally this time he’s willing… which is key.
We’re both pretty excited about this plan and I will post recipes of our successes here whenever I can. I am still super busy with the new business, but if I can figure out how to do the recipes from my iPad, I’ll be golden. 😉
I’d love to hear your suggestions for healthy family meals in the comments. You can leave a link to a recipe or just tell me how you do it. It takes a village after all. 🙂
Salúd!!
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