My husband let me sleep in this morning! God I love him. Downside: for breakfast? He gave the girls the peaches in the jar in the fridge. The brandied peaches, that is. My bad for not labeling them, although in my defense, I did introduce them as “boozy” when we ate them the first time.
Don’t worry, he said, the girls thought they were “yucky” and didn’t eat them.
For lunch, he decides to take the initiative to make pancakes. We buy Bob’s Red Mill pancake mix. I know, it’s lazy, but I really love that brand and am into making my own life easier with the toddlers. Jon has never made the pancakes, so I come downstairs to give him initial direction. That is, I take all the ingredients out, measure them, and put them in the bowl. I hand him the bowl to stir, and ask him to sprinkle corn onto the pancakes so we can squeak a veggie in. I take the corn out of the fridge and put it on the counter, next to the frying pan.
Later: “How did the girls like the pancakes?” He reports back that they loved the pancakes, but that he didn’t use the corn—too risky.
“They really need a veggie today,” I say.
“I gave them raisins for breakfast.”
“That’s not a vegetable. It’s sugar.”
Rolling his eyes, he informs me that he took nutrition in college and knows what he’s talking about.
He goes to work, I’m on my own for dinner. I make pasta with roasted summer veggies and sautéed spinach with balsamic vinegar. They love anything with vinegar, so I figure that is a good way to introduce them to spinach for the first time. Mind you, we are talking about fresh local spinach from the farmers market. Good stuff!
I’m smart enough (just barely) to know that mixing in the veggies with the pasta renders the pasta poisonous, so I put the veggies on the side, but with that part of the plate closest to their faces.
They immediately spin the plates around, eat the pasta, ask for seconds, and then thirds. They eat all the pasta. I tell them they can have yogurt for dessert if they eat some of their veggies. Phoebe makes a big show of putting pieces of vegetable in her mouth, then taking them back out when she thinks I’m not looking. Eliza tries the spinach and says, “I like it!” Then, when I ask her to eat more, admits: “It yucky.”
My role in this family is that I pretend to feed my children vegetables. My husband’s role is that he lives in reality.
