Last night for dinner I was serving meatballs. Teriyaki & pineapple meatballs made entirely of chicken. They were quite tasty. But the moment that sweetE realized I was heating up the oven to make meatballs, not dino nuggets, he was up in arms. "I don't want meatballs, I don't like meatballs, I want chicken nuggets."
Being the creative kid that he is, he drew a picture. He asked me how to draw no. So I wrote the word no on a piece of paper. That was not what he had in mind. So I drew a circle with a slash through it. That is what he wanted. Then he required a piece of tape.
This is what I got.
The man on my oven was saying no. At first it was no to the oven. Then it was no to using the oven to make meatballs. Had I wanted to switch and make dino nuggets, that would have been okay.
Later when dinner was made and it was time to eat, there was the usual complaints. But when he actually tried the meatball, he thought it was okay, good even. Not good enough to eat more than one bite, but certainly not the horror that he had made it out to be.
Tonight we had the same, eww, gross response to dinner while in the pan. But sweetE ate it all and wanted more. I also instituted the "You have to choose one dinner and help me make it per week, and it can't be pizza every week" rule. I'll let you know how it goes.
7 comments:
that's a good rule. teaches them cooking and responsiblity and shows them where the food comes from and how hard you work.
my parents had the "three bites" rule: if we didn't like something, we had to eat three bites of it before we could leave the table.
in other words, you had to give everything a fair chance.
Laurie- We have the three bites rule too. After that they can have cereal to fill them up.
You're much nicer than I am. My children eat what I make or go hungry. Oddly enough, they usually find something on the table at dinner time that they will happily eat, and always have, even when they were little.
I love E's sign! Reminds me of a 3 yr old Tuck who put hand-drawn stop signs all over the house one Christmas. He'd noticed people's yard signs and asked me to read the writing, "Santa, stop here!"
Ah, internal organs... Imagine fresh(?) stomach being roasted on the barbeque outside your window in Ghana
That picture is great! At least, if it wasn't so exasperating!! I like the helping with one dinner a week idea...
We have one in our house too who declares food to be yucky as soon as he sees it on his plate. We stand firm. Some nights he goes to bed having had no dinner at all, other times he eventually capitulates, tries the food and realizes he likes it. (We rarely cook things we know he doesn't like!)
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