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Bedtime Approaches; Fear the Carrot…

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Fear the Carrot
The carrot – strikes fear into the heart of toddler parents everywhere…

Tonight was just your average night. Finish with work, pick up kids, haul them up the 22 stairs into the house… breathe… (maybe!) And start dinner.

Oh dinner. How I’ve come to hate thee.

Virtually every parent of a toddler anywhere knows what I’m talking about. Especially if they have the dreaded “picky eater.” Which is, you know, probably almost all of them. At least one per household if you made multiples.

“What would you like for dinner, Liam?”

“I DON’T WANT DINNER! I WANT JUICE! AND CHEESE!”

That’s… pretty much how every night starts.

Various attempts ensue… I try really hard to just fix a dinner with things I’m at least 65% sure there’s a chance he’ll eat (my daughter’s only 11 months so she still eats everything… no worries there!) Games are involved. Airplanes, trains and automobiles all make various delivery attempts directly from plate to gullet. Eventually he caves to parental pressure and agrees to eat willingly for a few brief moments; I usually have a 33% success rate with whatever I’ve put on his plate.

Then the wrangling and finagling starts: “Mommy, I want a nanna. Mom, can I have ice cream? Mommy, can I have an apple? Mommy, I want chocolate. Mommy I need yogurt.” The theme of his needs is fairly consistent: fruit or sweets.

To which I respond with a variety of different responses along the lines of: “Not until you finish your turkey. You would need to have one more bite of carrots. Not until we finish our peas! But you can’t leave all these trees on your plate!” Notice the sides of the battle we always seem divided by?

Tonight. Perfect example. He ate a few bites of a yogurt he helpfully helped himself to instead of trying his dinner. That’s right – he can now open the fridge by himself, oh, goody! Then I tricked him into eating a little bit of turkey, but there was no touching the carrots. I almost thought he was going to go for the “I double-dog-dare-you” move… but at the last moment, he ground them up and then spit them out in truly disgusting form back onto his plate.

He made sure to upchuck some of that orange goodness onto my hand in his delight.

Well, no juice for you tonight mister. That was just… crossing a mastication-line I didn’t particularly want to cross tonight.

Some crying followed. But then there were trains so all was well in camp small boy. Mommy washed her hands with Dawn to cut through the slime and moved on with clean-up.

Bath time proceeded normally.

Then we brush our teeth (always a pleasure. HA! Hashtag: sarcasm.)

Get our jammies on, and curl up with a last drink of water before bed. Mommy or Daddy snuggles in with a book and we read two… or three… or four stories…

Liam, recognizing the system/routine for what it is has started trying to wiggle in just a few more minutes as best he can. Which occasionally means… he asks for a carrot.

DON’T ASK ME WHY! I CLEARLY DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT HERE!!!

I’m like: “Really? Seriously? Do you think I’m crazy? That’s what you spit out at me a mere hour ago! Why do you want a carrot?!?”

Straight face: “I need one, Mommy. A big one.”

Not straight face: “Well. I’m just going to call your bluff on this one mister. You wait right here and I’ll be back with your ‘big carrot!'”

*trek down 14 stairs to kitchen… open fridge… open bottom drawer… extract ‘big carrot’… race to peel carrot… trek back up 14 stairs to bedrooms…*

“Here you go, bub…”

*”Bub” proceeds to take carrot, examine it critically for a moment, and then eat. the. entire. thing.*

I am completely convinced I am insane. Pick a reason, any reason. All points are clearly valid.

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