You know that you’ve spent too much time fighting to get your kids to eat when you are arguing with them to eat their dessert. That seems to be the position I found myself last night with my son over a bowl of lemon pudding. We had made an instant box of it and divvied it up 4 ways evenly. My daughter, my wife and I ate ours up pretty swiftly (it IS pudding – there isn’t really any chewing and what’s not to like), but my son seemed to eat about half of his and then proceeded to engage in one of his favorite past times – jumping on and dismantling the couch.
I only pushed him on the pudding to get a sense of whether he was even interested in finishing it – not to force it on him (the less sugar the better, really). But he was too busy bouncing around to pay any attention to the line of questioning. So I finally put it such that if he doesn’t want the rest, someone else would gladly finish it for him – to which my 5-year-old daughter responds “I’d like to volunteer to be that person.” I swear that not a week goes by that she doesn’t surprise me with some new word or phrase that she has seamlessly integrated into her vocabulary.