thing you want is to be one of those people who screams at your spouse: “I told you s/he should have eaten those vegetables!” to which you’re sure your better half will reply with a deeply heartfelt and completely understanding, “Unh-huh.”
So, for those moms and dads who are weary of the battle of the greens, we offer these helpful suggestions:
1. The next time you serve peas, place one pea on the plate. Eating this is an achievable goal which could lead, sometime in the next decade, to your putting two peas on the plate and having them consumed.
2. Hide spinach in the potatoes. In fact, blend it in and cover the whole mass in cheese. It has been scientifically proven that the sight of cheese disarms the anti-vegetable reaction in a child’s brain.
3. Do not serve veggies with the main course. Hold them for dessert. Treat them as a privilege, a reward, a special treat and tell the kiddies can’t have vegetables unless they eat all their spaghetti and ice cream.
4. Put kohlrabi in a vase in the middle of the table and then dare anyone to eat it. Whoever volunteers gets a substantial prize like a trip to Vegas. If you want to make this contest interesting, offer to make it a double-dare where you will take the first bite. Then go to Vegas.
5. Buck the old unwritten law, “Don’t play with your food.” Instead encourage your children to build things with their vegetables on the condition that they can destroy the structure, the cartoon charter or the design only with their fork and only by eating the evidence. Keep a camera handy; you’ll want to post the bean faces, spinach rockets and sauerkraut montages on the fridge door.
6. Serve a well-balance meal where only the vegetables are cooked. This tends to put the meal into perspective and stimulate meaningful dialog, like “Mo-o-o-m, when are we really gonna EAT?”
7. Make each child read “No Carrots for Harry” ten times.
8. Promise to substitute vitamin pills for vegetables in return for good grades.
9. Turn the kids loose on the neighborhood to forage for themselves at mealtime. This is especially practical if you live near restaurants with big dumpsters in the back. If your kids are good foragers, you will save a lot on groceries. If they are not good foragers, you might see a fresh attitude at mealtime.
10. Offer a reward to the child who can “take a pea” the most times during dinner. They’ll respond to the crude humor and just may choose to compete.
My all-time favorite method which hasn’t worked out yet but is fun to do is get out the old guitar, put on those old patched bell-bottom jeans, scrub off the makeup and sing a couple of verses of “All we are saying is Give Peas a Chance.” Because one way or another, the kids have got to eat those veggies.
The Great Juice Dilemma
“Daddy,” my young daughter asked out of the blue during breakfast. “Why is orange juice called orange juice? It looks kind of yellow to me.”
This is one of those cosmic questions where there really isn’t any good answer so, reluctantly we fall back on the truth. “Well, honey, I guess it’s because the juice comes from an orange.”
“Okay, but the juice is yellow.”
“Yes, I see,” I replied thoughtfully. “Then maybe we should call the fruit a Yellow. Fresh Florida Yellow Juice just doesn’t have the same ring to it, do you think?”
“No, I guess not,” the little girl said. “But it’s too hard. There should be a rule about whether the juice is named after its color or the name of the fruit it came from. Who decides these things anyway?”
I shrugged an agreeable, “I don’t know,” kissed the quizzical face goodbye and bolted for the morning train.
Who does decide these things, I pondered on the way to work. Grape juice is purple, but we name it after the fruit it came from. White grape juice is technically light yellow and white grapes are a kind of pinky, translucent, greenish opaque. Are the people who grow these things too lazy to call them “opaques?”
What is that sitting next to my morning donut but a nice steaming cup of brown juice? Oh, we could call it coffee thinking of the brown bean that yields the distilled fluid, but then coffee color is really more like café au lait which is brown juice with just a bit of white juice in it.
Now here’s a dilemma. Milk is named after neither its source nor its color. How now, brown milk doesn’t sit well. Milky white is familiar, but now we’re complicating things with just another type of white juice. After a delightful lunch, I am pone to ask, “Waiter, may I have a cup of brown juice with just a bit of white juice in it?”
“Certainly,” he replies. “Will there be anything else, Sir?”
“Yes,” I say because the brown juice is so strong. “I need a glass of clear juice with ice.”
“Very good, Sir.”
There are any number of liquids that could appear on my table as clear juice. White vinegar for my salad is actually clear sour apple juice. But what of the clear juice that comes frozen in cubes, keeping other clear liquids cold? We don’t call that clear juice anymore because it is a different form. We could call it earth juice or snow juice or river juice or lake juice or straight-out-of-the-pipe juice. But technically, it’s not a juice at all. Maybe it would be a juice if it was squeezed from something, like the melt from mittens sitting on the radiator after an afternoon’s work making snowmen. Mitten juice. Yum. This is confusing.
Lime juice is greenish, lemon juice s yellowish, tomato juice is tomato-reddish. Papaya juice is, well, papaya colored. Apple juice resembles specimens sent to the lab. That settles it. From hereafter, I decree that all juices shall be named after their source, no matter what. If for no other reason than to make it easier for my kid to fathom why it’s okay for her orange juice to be yellow.
“Excuse me, Sir,” the waiter said. “Would you like some more coffee?”
“Yes,” I said. “Decaf. And with just a bit of cow if you please.”
The Day the Fish Died
Pets are certainly cute. Educational. Companionable. Interesting. They add to the cultural depth of the family unit. That is, until they die.
“Oh, Mavis,” the frantic friend sobbed over the phone. “What’m I gonna do? Ariel’s goldfish, Finlandia, died this morning and I’ve got until 3:30 this afternoon to think of something. If that girl gets home from school and finds Finny floating belly-up, she’ll have a pre-teen PMS hissy-fit. She loves that fish.”
“Take it easy, Brenda, it’s only a fish.”
“ONLY A FISH!” she blurted. “We’ve nurtured that little copper-bodied creature for three years. I changed its water. I balanced its pH. We bought it snails for company. Ferns for color. A little treasure chest for variety. Ariel bought it Christmas gifts. Surely you’ve seen the cute little ceramic skeleton lying on the filter.”
“But Brenda, it’s still only a fish.”
“There you go again! It was always there. It went on vacation when we went on vacation. My baby fed it Cheerios. When the fins started to rot we bought it medicine. It was like a member of the family… my husband’s side… but still, like one of our children. What’re we gonna do?”
Brenda, listen to me,” the friend counseled. “Get a grip. Maybe there’s a lesson here. Death is part of life. All good things come to an end. The fish lives on in our memories forever. You know what I mean. Find a fancy little box. Wrap the corpse in tin foil. Have a solemn ceremony in the back yard and bury the little bugger with dignity. You’ll see. After a brief time of mourning, the memory will fade and the lessons will live on.”
“Hey, hey,” the voice said, clearly not having been affected by any of the previous conversation. “Maybe I can go to the pet shop and replace the thing. Finlandia Junior. Whaddaya say?”
“Brenda, I don’t think…”
“Oh, hey, gotta go. The milkman’s here for his butter money if you know what I mean. Bye.”
The next day, precisely at 8:45 a.m., the telephone rang at Brenda’s house. It was Mavis. “So what HAPPENED?” she said without so much as a hi, howarya. “Have I reached
hissy-fit heaven?”
“Nah, you won’t believe it,” the mom said jovially. “Ariel got home precisely at 3:32 looking for cookies and milk. I sat down with her over snacks at the breakfast table and told her as calmly as I could, and I did not cry, that something terrible had happened. She stopped chewing and got that worried wrinkle between her eyebrows that boldly stated tell me more. I’m sorry dear, I said, Finlandia died.
“She was quietly chewing. There were no tears. No tantrums. She turned to stare out the window for a few seconds but then turned back, saying these words solemnly to me:
‘Mom, that’s okay. I know how much you liked that fish. But I need a science project. Can we boil it so I can take the skeleton to school? Please? Can I do it today? I get extra credit if I turn it in this week. Can I see the body? Please?’”
“Brenda, no!”
“Mavis, YES. I’m off the hook! Finlandia will live as an instructional aid for all eternity.”
“So what if the dog dies?”
“I guess I’ll have to get a bigger pot.”
A Kitchen for Christmas
It was strictly against my better judgment to buy my son a toy kitchen. After all, I reasoned, must we work so hard to tear down the stereotype boy and girl things? What will be next? Teaching little girls to wrestle? Giving little boys makeup kits? No, I said emphatically, not my son.
But I hadn't figured on Grandma.
The big box showed up just before Christmas, a few days before