The invasion of fruit
Sometimes changes to our family routine come with a bang. I’ll announce to the kids what the change will be and then I enforce the change until it becomes habit. Other times change happens without my planning it at all. I’ve noticed one of these second changes lately. The kids have been eating healthier. This is primarily because I stopped buying crackers or chips and started buying fruit instead. The disappearance of crackers and chips from our diets is the fault of the ants. There is a nest of ants that cruises the floor of our dining area. Anytime they found crumbs, the ants would come out in force. Then I would spend a mealtime exhorting the kids to stop paying attention to the ants and eat. My kids are incapable of eating crackers or chips without strewing crumbs everywhere. I’m not likely to remember to sweep after every snack. The best solution was to just stop supplying the crumby food.
Unfortunately the exit of crackers and chips left us with a snack vacuum. I needed something to hand the kids when they were hungry between meals. Enter the fruit. It started with apples and bananas. Then Patch mentioned that he’d eaten plums at preschool and liked them. So I brought home plums. I bought nectarines too since they were sitting right next to the plums in the store. Both were eaten and enjoyed. On my next trip to the store I cruised around the produce section to see what caught my eye. Grapes came home and so did limes because Gleek had expressed a desire to eat one. (That was amusing. She claimed to like them because they tasted just like her favorite lime-flavor chips, but she did not eat very much.) I started serving fruit with every lunch. It made lunches easy. Sandwiches alone were boring, but if there was a new kind of fruit to try, that was interesting. Then one day I’d forgotten to stock up fruit. I put out celery with ranch dressing, and they ate it.
Treats have not disappeared entirely. We still have treatish food for bedtime snacks, but even there we’re doing more bagels and fewer cookies. I think we’re going to be trying lots of different kinds of fruits this summer. Today I bought kiwi fruit. I know lots of people who love them, but I’ve never been able to get past that brown fuzzy skin. Tomorrow’s lunch will have kiwi. I don’t know whether I can make this change permanent, but I have hopes that the trend will last. It isn’t any harder to reach into the fridge for fruit than it is to reach in the cupboard for a fruit roll up. Granted, fruit will go bad if I leave it around for too long, but if we’re eating fruit daily, that won’t happen. All I know is that for now I’m enjoying this exploration into the world of fruit eating.