Just Eat It

This evening I put my very, very crispy baby to bed and decompressed by perusing the cookbook I bought at the school book fair. I purchased it on a whim, feeling sparks of excitement about recreating the gorgeous dishes featured in the full-page photographs facing each recipe.

Why do I do this to myself?

Thumbing through a bunch of amazing-sounding recipes to get inspired for my dinner repertoire is a vestige of my old life--the one before I had four sons who, I've accepted (begrudgingly), are morbidly picky eaters.

Author's Snarky Aside: If at this point you are smugly thinking that my children are terrible, picky eaters because I haven't a) exposed them to healthy foods in all their varieties or b) shown them an example of healthy eating myself or c) involved them in choosing and preparing good foods for family consumption, then you clearly do not know the history of our strange little clan. If you are inclined to judge me and our family's odd foodways, all I have to say to you is this: Go back to pinning Green Smoothie recipes on Pinterest and take your judgments with you. Leave the morbidly picky eaters with their sensory integration issues to me. That is all. 

There I had stood at the book fair that sunny autumn day, dreaming about whipping up some new simple, delicious meals. Thinking it could be a real possibility in my decidedly NOT simple weekday routine with my uniquely inflexible children.

"This book could very well be just the ticket," I thought while standing amid my baby, my preschooler, and a library filled with second-graders. "The ticket to an array of yummy dinners which do not at all resemble the French toast, spaghetti, tacos, and Dino nuggets which have become all we ever eat. EVER."

Will I ever attempt the Moroccan meatballs with spicy tomato sauce? Or the pork vindaloo or the lamb curry? What about the chicken Provençal? And if I do, will the boys eat them?

Who's to say? Tonight I looked up from reading the chickpea chili ingredient list to see Jack stepping in blobs of poop on the rug.

After dealing with that dreamboat of an after-dinner mess, I spent ten minutes with a pencil and a handful of wipes cleaning more poop out of Henry's sneaker treads. While helping me search for all the offending droppings, a certain Nike made unfortunate Code Brown contact.

I'm pretty positive that tomorrow night we will have frozen pizza.