New year pledge #1 - meal variety
New year pledge #1
I will cook varied and healthy meals for my kids. I will provide meals that stimulate their taste buds and promote good eating habits.
The challenge
My 5 year old is a notoriously picky eater. Or non-eater, depending on how you look at it. She drinks a lot of milk and likes to snack on crackers, gummies and chips. I try to make those unavailable but she appears just fine with milk only. With some prodding, she would eat a few pieces of sausage, fish sticks or other highly processed foods. I had allowed this to go on for too long due to the convenience of said processed foods.
How did we fall into such poor eating habits
I don’t really know. At one, when she was newly introduced to adult fare, she voraciously dug into everything. And by everything, I mean iyan and egusi, beans cooked in palm oil, rice, moin-moin, etc - all Nigerian foods, spicy and hot. A lot of kids refuse to eat these foods, but not my Darling Angel - she gobbled it all up. That was at age one. Next thing I can remember, she was turning it all down and would only eat sausage or pancake or fish sticks or chicken nuggets or fries. (Never a combination though, just one at any one time.)
Why the history? Well, whatever I did wrong, I do not want to repeat it with Baby Brother. His appetite currently exceeds his sister’s when she was one. He too is gobbling everything down and has a well rounded tummy as evidence. While I on one hand wonder when (or if) it will be necessary to start taking precautions against childhood obesity, I also wonder if he will suddenly turn away from food and adopt the picky lifestyle.
Since I can’t think of anything I did to cause Darling Angel’s aversion to food, I figure the key may be in what I did not do vs. what I did.
And one thing I did not do 4 years ago was to ensure that there was sufficient variety in our meals. I just stuck to and repeatedly offered the foods that worked.
Hope
As I write this, I am not yet sure what form our meal variety will take. But I hope that Darling Angel’s new-found 5-year old maturity can be leveraged to convince her to try new foods. I hope that she will discover or rediscover foods that she likes. I hope that Baby Brother continues to have a good appetite and grows up eating healthy. I hope that the effort helps me to keep up a healthy diet myself. Hubby likes his staple naija foods but I’m hoping he joins in and tries some variety too.
