Finding The Middle Ground

A post from my email archives. Original date for this story: 26 September 2006

As anyone raising a picky eater knows, feeding said eater can be a tricky negotiation. It is a struggle to find and present desirable (read: acceptable) food choices while simultaneously striving for proper nutritional content. It is a veritable balancing act. In this as in many things, Andrew tips the scale full tilt. To rate his picky eating on a scale of 1-10 is to register him as a 15.
His food repertoire consists of:
yogurt
peanut butter
pancakes
an occasional banana
m&m’s
cookies.
I’m not kidding. That’s the list in its entirety. Recently that list has shrunk to peanut butter. To be fair he does enjoy a good scoop of chocolate paste alongside his peanut butter. Chocolate paste is a common spread here; it is a thick spreadable mix of hazelnut and chocolate. You will likely know the product Nutella. It has the consistency of frosting from the can, and undoubtedly beats the sugar content by half. At some point we opted for calorie count over nutritional content, or maybe we just gave up and gave in, I don’t remember.
At any rate, he eats chocolate paste with his peanut butter. Andrew eats peanut butter for breakfast. He requests peanut butter for lunch. On the rare occasion that I can get him to eat dinner, he will take a bite of, you guessed it, peanut butter and be done with it. This morning our breakfast negotiation went something like this:

“How about a pancake?”

“unnng!” (This being interpreted as “no thank you beautiful mother, that doesn’t suit me this morning, but thanks ever so much for your kind offer”)

“Would you like a yogurt?”

No response.

“How about some cereal? Mommy is having cereal. We could both have cereal!”

“unnngggh!”

“Well? What would you like to eat for breakfast?”

“peanut-butter-chocolate”

I am not surprised of course, but I make one final attempt at a variation on the diet.

“Okay.” I say. “How about a sandwich? I will make you a peanut butter and chocolate sandwich. I will even use white bread. How does that sound?"

And clear as any elocution from the great orators of mankind he says:

“No. peanut-butter-chocolate. IN MY MOUTH.”