How to encourage healthy eating....

My children will try pretty much any type of food.

I count this as a blessing.  Particularly since I didn't even eat Pizza until I was 20 years old.

I was bought up in a typical English environment, where the meals consisted of 'meat, potato and veg' or were children's meals like 'beans on toast', 'dippy egg' or 'tomato soup with soldiers'.  To this day my parents don't eat rice, or pasta, or anything that hints at a herb other than mint (only with lamb).  Whilst you can quite happily eat traditional English food in a healthy way, I'm pleased that I have a wider variety of foods with which to now tempt my children, which I gained purely as a result of spending 3 years at university and 'experimenting'.  With food, obviously.  My girls are now; helpfully; big fans of pasta (even cold in salads; which I hate).  They love rice (quick and easy, and they'll even help sweep up the mess afterwards).  And we've recently introduced them to poppadoms and chicken bhuna, with great success.

It's not been easy though.  Our youngest, now 30 months old, continues to go through stages of 'pickiness'.  And I refuse to rise to it.  I continue to offer a selection of foods, and the availability of pudding is directly related to how much main course she's eaten.  A small amount of main course equates to a small amount of pudding.  And we have, whilst out at a restaurant, allowed her older sister to eat ice cream for pudding, even though the youngest hadn't eaten mains and was therefore not allowed any.  She whined.  But we stuck to our guns, and she now always eats at least some of her main course.

And I think that's the trick.  When you realise that they will never starve themselves at this age.  That they'll eat when they are hungry.  And that rising to it only makes it into a game that you really don't want to be playing. And when you realise that children's potion sizes are so much smaller than ours, and that a tiny plate of pasta and meatballs is actually quite filling, and that a single 'dippy egg' with one slice of bread to dip can keep them going for ages.

These days we would probably be considered old fashioned for our approach.  Which consists of this: make dinner, place dinner in front of children, allow them appropriate time to eat dinner, call end to dinner and remove remaining food.  If they choose not to eat it, well they'll need to wait until the next snack time (for fruit) or for the next meal (where they inevitably eat a whole lot better.) 

Sometimes you just need to remember who's in charge!

It should definitely be Scatty Mummy!

I'm still trying to get the stain off my favourite shoes......

We took the girls out for a meal at the local 'Inn' on Saturday lunch. The 'Inn' at Troway do great British food, brilliant offerings for the children (they eat free on weekdays), and have colouring books, crayons, reading books, jigsaws etc, to keep them entertained whilst you wait for the freshly cooked food to arrive.

My youngest, Lottie, is helpfully starting to tell us when her nappy needs changing. Repeating "nappy, nappy, nappy" tends to do the trick. She is also starting to say "wee-wee". And on Saturday I realised that she was trying to tell us she needed to go before she actually did. It caught me by surprise, but I thought, well she's young, but she has been copying her big sister recently, so perhaps potty training will be faster for her and easier for me. We can always hope.

So I whipped her out of her high chair, and scuttled off to the toilet with her. She was really good. She tried to help with her trousers, pulled down her pull-up nappy, and when I sat her on the toilet she grinned, and started to go.

Brilliant! I thought. For roughly a second. It took that long for me to notice that I hadn't sat her far enough on the toilet. Her "wee-wee" was all over the seat, all over the floor and all over my feet.

This is definitely why Jimmy Choos just don't go with children. And why I have such difficulty finding yummy clothes, shoes, bags and jewelry that are child-proof, or at the very least, easily washable!