Vegetable Horror Stories

Or: Dinner with my 3 and a half-year-old

If you've ever had or known a toddler, pre-schooler, or really any young child, you'll know how difficult it can be to get them to eat anything resembling a healthy meal.  So, any number of tricks, schemes, cajoling, sweet talking, negotiation, and playing may be necessary to get the job done.  In our house, we employ the full spectrum depending on the situation.

Recently it all seems to be play. My son has been very interested in family units recently. Most of his play is about Mommys, Daddys, brothers, sisters, and babies. There also seems to be a lot of pretending people are dead and then coming back to life.

When applied to vegetables at the dinner table, I was finding meal time to be rather morbid and actually a bit horrific.  Take the following for example:

As he eats a carrot: "Oh no, Mommy carrot! The shark ate my skin!" And now I'm imagining the peeling process entirely differently.

Then, there was the broccoli family. He kept having me play the mommy broccoli.  The daddy broccoli was telling the mommy broccoli that the baby broccoli had been eaten by a fire man.  So, I made mommy broccoli cry.

Him: "It's alright Mommy broccoli, we're going to get another baby!"

Me: "Oh really, from where?"

Him: "The other trees (another term we use for broccoli) are giving us a baby."

Me: "Oh! My dear sweet baby!"

He then takes this small bit of broccoli from me and eats it.

Him: "Oh no Mommy broccoli! The fire man ate the baby again!"

This process went on for a bit including missing babies that turn up eaten instead of just being eaten outright.  That daddy broccoli totally sucks at child care and supervision. But then, his head was repeatedly dunked in ketchup and sucked clean again. That has to mess with you, right?

They say that the way kids play is just the way that they process life.  That generally it is harmless. I know that the Mommys and Daddys and everyone tends to come back to life when he plays. There's a bit of that "pretend I'm dead Mommy" to which I pretend to cry and then he jumps up and says "I'm alive again!" Or "I cut off your head!" "Okay, tape, tape, tape, (pretending he's wrapping it in tape) I fixed it again! You're okay!" These examples prove that it will all be okay again. I heard an NPR story about this (boys play) on the radio this morning, but darned if I can find it online...

So, if it weren't for the fact that he also plays Phillies (today I was Carlos Ruiz and he was Cliff Lee) and Camden Riversharks and other less horrific imaginings, I'd be worried.  As it is, he has changed the way I look at my vegetables forever.

I mean, after meals like the above, I guess I'm glad he doesn't want to play with the fried zucchini.