Everybody's talking about this

Picky eaters? They get it from you

I'll weigh in: Yeah, they get it from you in more than one way. That pickiness might be genetic, but you know what's not? Cooking a different meal for every member of the family and changing your international flights because your kid likes rice. That's all you.

I get such a kick out of the NYT coverage of families and parenting. What a strange little world these stories create, where the kids are everything and the hapless parents are seen saying things like, "You know that $5,000 vacation in Prague? We just had no choice but to turn it into a $10,000 vacation in Spain." I know it's not reality, but I like to laugh at it all the same.

For the record, my kids are picky. And I don't give a damn. My job ends when I put dinner on the table. Someday they'll eat those vegetables I keep putting in front of them. They may be 25, but it will happen someday.

When I was brave

When I was 22, I stood on top of a sand dune in Lithuania and said aloud, "The world belongs to 22-year-olds." I was wearing my only pair of shoes, the only ones I needed. I had friends. I had a train ticket and enough money leftover from a fellowship to cover gritty hostels for a while. I had a job in a new city. No apartment, but a roommate. No health insurance, but a parental safety net. All the freedom in the world -- literally the world -- and almost no responsibility.

I was brave. That was the year, or the next, that I knit myself a dress. I wasn't an accomplished knitter. I didn't have a pattern. I had never done lacework. I didn't know, in fact, that I was doing lacework. But I had a stitch dictionary, a lot of time spent on trains and buses, and a need for a dress to wear to a wedding in France with an English boy I had just kissed. So I made a dress. I finished it a few hours before the early-morning taxi pulled up to take me to the airport.

That was also the year I founded a magazine. With someone else's money, of course, but my own and a friend's sweat and tears. (No blood, although I did grind a bone in my foot into powder while pounding the streets in wooden clogs. Thank god for parents willing to pay for surgery in the American-run hospital.)

I still have the dress. It doesn't fit anymore, but that's not why I get nostalgic when I take it out. I would no more knit a lace dress without a pattern today than I would found a magazine.

I can't pinpoint when bravery -- or foolhardiness - lost out to caution. But there were seeds of it even then. Stories I didn't write, jobs I never believed I would be qualified for, paths I thought were already closed to me. I was learning to sell myself short, but I didn't yet know what I couldn't do.

That sounds maudlin. And I'm not. I wouldn't go back to being 22. I'm just glad I acknowledge how good it was at the time.

What does this have to do with feeding my kids? No idea. Where did all the nostalgia come from? I'm pretty sure I know: Yesterday at the Y I forgot my towel and had to dry off with my shirt. Ah! Good hostel-y times.

An inconvenient truth

I uncovered a deeply perpetrated fraud last night: convenience foods.

We were headed home after work, a car full of chattering preschoolers (two of them and their chatter fill up the car). Dinner was to be chicken cacciatore, but I hadn't cut up the chicken yet. I'm really not good at cutting up chickens. A friend was coming over for dinner, so I couldn't resort to our usual can't-face-cooking fall-back: cereal and yogurt. So I thought, "Hey, I'll swing by the grocery store and pick up something to throw in the oven. Yeah! People do that all the time. That's what that deli counter is for. And the freezer case. It'll be great."

"Swing by" -- that was my first mistake. Nobody swings by the grocery store with two tired, hungry kids at 5:30 in the evening. We escaped with a poorly chosen lasagna, a greasy potato dish, and a salad about half an hour and way too much money later. Turns out the lasagna wanted 45 minutes in the oven (I should have guessed that). Heck, I could have cut up that chicken and made the dang cacciatore in 45 minutes. So I followed the microwave directions, breaking my no-heating-plastics rule and turning the cheese into a hardened, plasticky mass. The potatoes went into the oven, where the grease separated out into great, globby pools. Dinner was on the table 15 precious minutes after it normally is.

The Little Bean had a breakdown and had to be tossed into bed early.

The Big Bean's verdict: "These potatoes are great, Mama!"

Thanks, kiddo.

My inner Bree

I've only seen a couple of episodes of Desperate Housewives. My taste in bad television runs more toward examinations of the quotidien lives of very short people and families with 16 kids.

But I do remember one scene: Bree is coldly serving her miserable family something like beef Wellington or pheasant under glass. Husband, daughter, son are all seated around a formal table with candles and china and linen. One of them whines, "Mom, why can't we ever eat real food, like pizza?"

I never set the table with linens and china. I never cook pheasant. In fact, I often stick to one-dish meals. But, deep down, I know that sometimes my desire to put a "real" meal in front of my family is more about me -- and more about Bree -- than it is about my kids.

(The kids who are now done with their waffles and ready to get dressed, so that's all for now.)

Some things learned while feeding the beans last week

1. Kohlrabi is "even better than carrots!" (Phew! It was getting mighty lonely eating that box of veggies all by ourselves.)

2. The surface area of a pound of gemelli is roughly half that of a pound of elbow macaroni. How do I know that? The half batch of cheese sauce now in my freezer, left over from the mac and cheese.

3. A single speck of green will ruin -- ruin! -- the Little Bean's enjoyment of his favorite food, meatballs. It will cause him to instruct me to "take da veggie out!" and lead to stupid, pigheaded arguments like, "No, if you don't like it, you take it out." "No, you!" "No, you." And so on.

4. Nothing tastes better than a picnic at the park on Friday afternoon, menu be damned.