bad habit: broken!

I haven't had time to look through Rose's 38-week "portraits" yet - I hope to get to that later this week. But in the meantime I thought I'd tide you over with this shot from dinner last night. Over the past several months, we had gotten into the really bad habit of giving Rose "treats" (Mum Mums, saltines, graham crackers, Puffs, or cheerios) if she didn't like whatever we were serving for dinner. It started off innocently enough back when she wasn't physiologically able to eat what we ate, but recently we started to notice that she would simply thumb her nose at our food and then cry until we gave her a "treat" instead.  Clearly she had quickly  pegged us as dinnertime pushovers.  But we firmly believe that we don't want her eating nutritionally vacuous meals (aka "kid food") while we eat the nutrient-dense "grownup food" we've been trying to incorporate more into our diets. And, on a really practical level, we also didn't want to set the stage for preparing multiple meals for dinner for the foreseeable future.

So, I'm proud to say that after about two weeks of slowly weaning all of us off of this terrible habit, last night Rose simply ate what we served! Yay, Rose! Three cheers for the brown rice with raisins, chickpeas and green peas that Mike made! (And thanks to Trula Anne for the great cook book!) Tonight she wasn't so keen on my veggie quinoa bake (this recipe modified with some additional baked squash and red bell peppers, plus some extra cheese), but c'est la vie - maybe she'll like the leftovers tomorrow, and I'm just proud that we can simply serve one yummy family meal each night from now on.

Have a great week, everyone!