There goes another thing I swore I’d never do before having kids…

In those care-free days (at least that’s how I remember them now), I self-righteously poo-poo’ed the trend of using subterfuge to get kids to eat their vegetables. The idea, popularized in Deceptively Delicious by Jessica Seinfeld (wife of Jerry), is to puree vegetables and add them to foods kids will eat, resulting in recipes like meatloaf (with carrots) and quesadillas (with butternut squash). Kids should learn to love vegetables, I thought, not be tricked into eating them! Oh, and I also thought my kids would never watch television and only play with wooden toys.

And, actually, we never had to resort to these tactics with our older son, Jack. While he has always had a tolerate-hate relationship with vegetables, Jack has always loved fruit. So, we figured the bananas, grapes, strawberries, and apples he ate on a daily basis, along with the cucumbers, carrots, and broccoli he managed to choke down on occasion was nutritionally sufficient. For the most part, Jack liked healthy food—tofu was among his favorites until recently, when, out of the blue, he decided he didn’t like it (I’m convinced one of the kids at his school told him it was supposed to be gross). And now that he’s able to completely communicate and use logic (call it “the age of reason”), even when he doesn’t want to eat healthy food, we can use incentive and/or punishment to encourage him.

But Benny, now 20 months old, has been a different story. Although he is much more compliant than his brother in so many ways, Benny refuses to eat pretty much any fruits or vegetables. For a long time, our pediatricians told us, he was getting most of the nutrition he needed from milk. But when we started to phase out the bottle, we were at a loss. No matter how hungry he was, Benny would simply refuse to eat anything “healthy.” He seemed to have a sixth sense for the stuff. He’ll eat endless chicken, turkey, meatballs, etc., and, of course, bread, cereal, and pasta, but if he accidentally put a zuchinni bit or broccoli floret that had been mixed in with his pasta in his mouth, he would immediately spit it out, as if it had set off some invisible sensor. Yogurt mixed with fruit and occasionally applesauce were the only reliable sources of fruits or vegetables.

We’ve tried not letting him have other foods unless he eats vegetables, but after maybe an hour of whining/screaming, we would usually relent and give him some turkey breast or cheerios. I suppose we could have been tougher and put him to bed hungry, but then we would likely all suffer.

Inspiration came a few weeks ago when we brought some beautiful zuchinni home from the farmer’s market. I looked up a recipe for zuchinni bread—which included two large zuchinnis in a small loaf, along with, of course, lots of butter and sugar—and made it. Benny couldn’t get enough. While it lasted, we gave him zuchinni bread instead of cheerios for breakfast, and instead of turkey for lunch. A few days later, my wife cut some broccoli into tiny pieces and mixed it with ground turkey to make meatballs. Benny devoured them! There were a few moments when he seemed to pause with something in his mouth—we were sure he was onto us—but he just kept putting the green stuff away.

We haven’t yet experimented with purees—and we haven’t bought the book yet—but we’re sold on the idea, at least as a stopgap measure. We intend to keep serving salad and grilled vegetables for dinner every night, and putting them on Benny’s plate, but until he’s convinced of how delicious they are, he’ll be getting what he needs. In his mashed potatoes.

Anybody have other ideas?

“It rained at Woodstock, and it might rain at KidStock too,” one of the event’s announcers said from the stage just before headliners Milkshake took the stage yesterday afternoon.

But the fleeting showers didn’t dampen the spirits of the dancing toddlers at Garrett Heights Elementary-Middle School in Hamilton-Lauraville yesterday, nor those of Milkshake frontwoman Lisa Mathews or the band, who gamely played their high energy hits for about an hour.

Besides Milkshake, we got a chance to see guitarist Tracey Eldridge with violinist John Glik, and the Little Maestros Band from Bethesda. We were in a drum circle tent, playing West African djembes and dunduns when the heavy rain hit. We just pounded our drums a little harder and waited it out. Our forebears at Woodstock would have been proud.

On a different note, there is now a Learning to Crawl fan page on Facebook. Click here to join. Thanks!

Having kids has, without doubt, given me the greatest joy of my life.

It has also often left me tired, angry, snappy and annoyed. Maybe it’s the sleep deprivation or the endless rounds of The Why-ing Game, but I find that little things that I might otherwise let roll off my back really get to me these days. A couple of examples…

1. Calling Toddlers Boyfriend/Girlfriend. Okay, I can see that on some level, at some time, this might have been considered cute and/or clever, but in my experience, it has long since passed over into gross and wildly inappropriate. It is also fairly endemic. At my boys’ pre-school, teachers often say to boy students “Are you my boyfriend?” or “How’s my boyfriend?” Worse, they often feign being hurt/dumped when the toddlers say “No.” Worse still, some say crap like “Are you flirting with me? Ooh boy, you really like to flirt!” And inevitably, if a kid smiles at them, they’ll say something like, “Oh, he’s going to break girls hearts some day.” Or, if it’s a girl, “You better lock her up from the boys.” What the hell is that? They’re three years old! They’re not flirting, they’re stacking blocks and frequently stopping to pick their noses! For all you know, they’ll be gay! They might be breaking little boys hearts some day. Point being, we won’t know for at least 10 years or so, so quit it!

And God help the confused children if they figure out the meaning or implication of words like boyfriend or flirt. I’ve never been anything like a prude, but connoting grown-up relationships or anything remotely sexualized to toddlers is pretty messed up. To get a sense of how wrong this is, imagine if a male pre-school teacher constantly called a little girl in his class his girlfriend and talked about how she was always flirting with him. He’d probably be locked up. In my mind, there is a direct link between this kind of thinking/behavior and six-year-old girls wearing sweatpants that say “JUICY” across the butt. It’s just wrong.

2. “Eating” Children. Okay, this one is pretty endemic too and I’m afraid I have some close friends and family who are guilty. The phrase “I could just eat you up” always sounded to me like a reasonable expression of cute-ness, far enough removed from any notion of actually eating children to raise an eyebrow. But somehow, for some reason, some well-meaning well-wishers having taken the concept into more literal territory. They say things like, “I could just take a bite out of those thighs,” or “I just want to sprinkle some salt all over her and gobble her up for dinner with a nice salad.” It’s almost like there’s a contest to be more literally disgusting in an effort to be the most metaphorically cute. But you know what? It’s just gross.

I anticipate that this could be a running series, so please let me know what kid-related stuff drives you crazy…

Alright, I'll post about something besides Milkshake soon (egg cream?), but I wanted to share this photo of our favorite local kids' band at the Grammy's (and take special note of bassist Cord Neal's Edgar Allen Poe t-shirt, representing our patron literary giant).

While they lost out to Ziggy Marley (see previous entry), the band says they had a great time. "Milkshake is happy to be back in Baltimore, but, geez, what a fun weekend," they said in a message poated on their Facebook page.

Check out more photos of the band at the Life magazine