How I Overcame Lazy This Week: I’m Trying To Eat Like A 5-Year-Old

We just had my daughter’s favorite dinner tonight:  salmon.  Wait, did I just write those words?  Could this possibly be true?

Tell me if I’m wrong, but it’s gotta be every parents’ dream to hear their 5-year-old child declare salmon as her favorite thing to eat.  Well, I’m livin’ the dream, then, because R has proclaimed just that.  I tend to believe her, too, because not only did she gasp with delight when I announced we’re having salmon for dinner but after she gobbled up her own portion, she demanded about half of mine!  My 3-year-old loves it too.

Trust me, my girls have VERY normal nutritional preferences on a day-to-day basis.  They would marry chicken nuggets and fries if they could, they go bonkers over “fruit” snacks and can magically find room in their tummies for large amounts of sweets just moments after they’ve declared themselves “stuffed” from picking over their dinner.

But there are enough aberrations from their typical kiddie predilections that I feel like I’m getting somewhere with their nutritional inclinations!

Another recent example:

The green guy is Rody.

He (although R calls him, “she”) is a bouncy horse toy inflated with air that one can sit upon and hop with… or dress up in a tutu and crown and use to give rides to Rapunzel Barbie…

Anyway, R told me one morning that she’d had a dream that Rody was broken open and brownies came falling out!  (She must’ve heard me talking in my sleep!)  So a few nights later as we cuddled at bedtime, I started the game of: what else could Rody be stuffed with?  Going off the brownie theme from her dream, I started listing off things like candy corn, Junior Mints, ice cream, etc.

She was giggling, enjoying the game, but quickly stopped me by saying that Rody should really be stuffed with healthy things first so we wouldn’t get a tummy ache!  Well, she certainly put me in my place!

So we switched gears and took turns listing healthier fare that could come tumbling out of a Rody piñata:  carrots, broccoli, pistachios, yogurt, bananas… and, yes, salmon.



In a perfect world, this would be the aftermath
of a pinata...

...not this.



Yep, it’s my 5-year-old that has helped me stay on track nutritionally more than once!  Now if I could just get her to figure out shoe-tying life would be sa-weet!