picky eaters
...out of this discussion. And I was hardly a svelte figure, but at least I tried to get my 5 fruits and veggies a day. But meal after meal was being ruined by the terrible Ts - tears, tantrums and tomato ketchup on hotdogs. Our first effort was to try to make food fun. My wife whipped up a batch of homemade mashed taters. Neither kid seemed interested. How about butter on that? No? Well, what about some ketchup? Aha - one thing that remains Heinz-free is mashed potatoes. Well, good for them. That's when we invented dinosaur food. A few drops of blue food coloring deftly stirred in while the tykes were otherwise occupied turned the potatoes a robin's breast blue. "Look, dinosaur food!" I screamed in the kitchen. Both boys came tearing in looking for the dinosaur while in the corner, I over-acted worse than Matt LeBlanc in any 3 Friends episodes. "Where did the dinosaur go?" asked the eldest. "He's gone now," I replied, "but he left his food. Let's eat it!" Yes, purists among you will be outraged that I added even more food coloring to a kid's food. Get over it. They were eating garbage anyway. A few more drops of chemicals in some healthy food was actually a step up. And you know what? They tried it. And they ate it. And we only had dinosaur food twice more before we switched to regular mashed potatoes. Of course, we had to have monkey brains (some sort of hamburger stew that my wife never makes the same way twice) and that was sufficiently gross enough on their scale to warrant giggles and several small bowls. We've also played squish the...