Here In The Land of Plenty

Oh my gosh, the food, the wretched food. How I hate the food involved in having kids.

If it was just me, I'd be very happy eating only once a day. I hate cooking, so I'd go out and get myself a large Caesar salad at McAlister's (extra croutons, and extra dressing on the side to dip them into, and unsweet tea with lemon and lots of ice).

My thing about food is, I'd be perfectly happy eating the same thing every day for a year. I get a favorite meal (see above) and that's pretty much all I want to eat for, well, forever. Okay, not forever, but the McAlister's thing has been hanging in there for a couple of years now. They know me. They give me whole bowls of extra croutons and an automatic extra lemon on my tea refills.

Kids, though. I can't solve the "feed the children" problem by simply taking them all with me to McAlister's every day (too expensive, and besides they rebel at eating at the same place ALL THE TIME).

No, they want meals, real meals cooked up by loving hands at home, and several of them a day. Now, I can understand this. I know that when they were babies, I should have predicted that all of them would grow out of the "nurse on demand" phase and would turn into actual people, real people with molars, demanding food that varies from day to day and has to be chewed.

What I can't understand is why the food thing has to be so doggone constant. Like, every ten minutes, somebody wants to eat something.

We just got back from a late Thanksgiving dinner with some relatives who had other relatives visiting them on Thanksgiving. We were provided with a filling meal of barbecue beef or pork sandwiches (take your pick), coleslaw, beans, potato salad, and ice cream and homemade cookies for dessert. AND, they had gotten some fast food french fries and chicken nuggets for the kids, just in case the kids didn't like barbecue. AND, the woman of the house indulged the little girls' requests for anything they wanted, which included apples, peeled and cut up, an orange, peeled and cut up, and some cherry tomatoes.

We've been home fifteen minutes and they have already hollered about my not wanting to provide bedtime snacks tonight. They're hungry. They're starving. They're dying.

For heaven's sake, we just left the House of Plenty where they were provided with everything their little hearts could desire (food-wise anyway) about an hour ago.

It wouldn't bother me, actually, if I thought that I'd fix a snack and they'd eat it. But I know that they'd play with it, argue about who had more, wander off to do something more interesting, and, eventually, fuss because I got rid of whatever they had left and they really really intended to come back to the table and eat some more.

Francie is the most difficult in this regard, but she does have an excuse. She lived in an orphanage her first two years of life. Toward the end of her time there, Haiti was in rough shape, and I suspect the orphanage was having a hard time getting enough food for everyone. Francie likes to be sure there's ample food available, so she will keep asking for food after she's reached the point where she no longer wants to eat it. She also tends to walk around, playing and talking and laughing, with some chewed food still in her mouth but not swallowed yet--as if she is hanging on to it for later.

We'd had her three days and were returning to the U.S. from Haiti with her, walking through a major airport, when she suddenly started to squirm and fuss in my arms. I looked around, mystified, and realized that she'd seen an empty, closed restaurant. No food smells, no people, but she saw the tables and chairs and recognized that this was a place that provided food--based, I assume, only on the three days of eating in the hotel restaurant that she'd had with us, since the toddlers didn't eat off tables at the orphanage. I was pretty impressed.

She was dedicated to food, and has remained so, although she's toned it down a bit. If we went to a restaurant, we used to have to get her crackers immediately or she'd spot the other people with their food and start screaming. Now, she can wait.

I guess the solution is People Chow, and I hope they invent it soon. We'll keep full bowls on the kitchen table, and the kids can graze at will. I can promise you, the second the People Chow patent goes through, I will never cook again.

Or maybe I should just have them all hooked up to IVs 24/7?