Pork Roast & Kids and Salad

Dinner Menu:

Red Butterhead Lettuce, Aged Feta Cheese and Japanese Cucumber Salad (Oxbow Farms, Glendale Shepherd, Mair Farm-Taki)
Herb & Mustard Slow Cooked Pork Roast (Olsen Farms)
Sauteed Baby Bok Choy, Shiitake Mushrooms, Fresh Garlic and Sweet Onion (farmer's market, Sno-Valley Mushrooms, farmer's market)
Rose Petal Iced Tea (Harbor Herbalist)

You might have noticed there's no fruit in this meal.  It's Wednesday, which means we're all out of the fruit we bought at the farmer's market over the weekend.  Our CSA pickup was yesterday, and didn't include any fruit this week since it's still the beginning of the season.  So the kids had bananas and split a LaraBar for their bedtime snack tonight; I think Will is planning on having the last of the chocolate paleo cupckaes from the 3 year old's birthday celebration last night.  I had an iced tea I had brewed and cooled earlier in the day, and out of principle for this experiment, had no dessert tonight.

Maybe my last pair of pre-pregnancy jeans will finally fit right tomorrow.  :-)

Anyways, onto the bulk of this post:

Kids and salad.  Or green vegetables in general.

That's a tough one.

We eat a lot of greens around here, especially during this time of the year when they are in full swing at the farmer's market and 90% of our CSA box is lettuce, hearty braising greens, bok choy, snap peas, etc.  And my children are no exception to this rule.  My 11 month old little guy inhales snap peas, stuffs handfuls of raw lettuce in his mouth, and will eat roasted veggies of all sorts: carrots, beets, sweet potatoes, squash, etc.

No, I don't have magical fairy children.  I do three things that I *think* have been instrumental in getting my kids to eat well.  (I say *think* because I am by no means an expert, and I'm sure I do plenty of dumb things as a parent.  But this is my best guess as to why my kids eat veggies.)

1) Most dinners, we have what we call "vegetable bowl" first.  It means if we're having a salad, we actually sit down and eat the entire salad.  Everyone.  Will and I model this behavior.  You cannot have the rest of your meal until your vegetable bowl/salad is finished.  On a night like tonight, my three year old knew that we were having slow cooked pork, and so she was happy to eat her little salad to get to the meat.  She also liked the salad, to be fair.  And I make her portion reasonable, as you can see:

Mommy Salad.  Toddler Salad.

 It makes more dishes, but it's totally worth it in my book.

**I always try to prep my vegetable bowls or salad during afternoon nap/quiet time.  It saves me come pre-dinner witching hour.

2) Our rule on dinner and snack/dessert is this: if you eat all of your dinner, you can have as much snack as you want.  If you don't finish your dinner, that is fine, but you only get one serving of snack at snack time right before bed.  We were having issues with our daughter picking at her dinner and then wanting an entire banana, two handfuls of cashews, a bowl of grapes AND an apple for "snack" that night.  Um, no.  That's a dinner.  Now if she finished her dinner that night and STILL wanted to eat all that for snack?  Fine!  That's a growth spurt!

3) I don't feed my children an afternoon snack.  Instead, we have dinner at 5 PM SHARP every night.  I know this won't work for every family, but since I stay at home and we only have young children without a million activities yet, it works for us.  It means some nights, like tonight, Will is a bit late to dinner.  (He usually can be home right at 5 PM since he's working on his PhD and he sets his own afternoon hours for the most part.)  But it also means that when the kids sit down to dinner, they are very hungry and happy to eat their vegetable bowl.  And we're eating earlier in the evening, before the total meltdowns before bedtime can happen, and everyone is in a much better mood and much more likely to eat their food without a major battle.

So that's what we do.  It seems to work, though not every time.  We have meltdowns, and we have days where someone is sick or we are exhausted and we slack on the rules.  Our kids still have preferences, and we allow them to express them within reason: one loves avocado, the other has never cared for them.  One loves salmon, the other will only eat it if really hungry.  They're still people who have likes and dislikes, and while I don't cater to it, I let them be who they are.

I'm definitely not saying this is the only way to do things, nor is it the right thing to do for everyone.  Everyone has their own unique family situation and their dinner time game plan should reflect that.  Parenting young kids is an adventure, and we're constantly evolving our approach to it as we learn more and experience more.  I'm sure we will figure it all out just in time for our youngest to graduate from high school.  :-)