So let her eat cake....

With our entire upstairs in upheaval, M is still working out of a disaster of a home office. Hopefully this will be cleared up somewhat by the end of the week. He had to get some stuff done today, so I took Laurel to the zoo. (One thing we are discovering about being self-employed....no paid holidays. Ever.)

Laurel noticed right away that I did not take a stroller to the zoo. "Dang it," she said. She noticed that most of the under 3 crowd were sitting in strollers munching on snacks she coveted. Cheez-its. Honey Grahams. Juice boxes.

We had water bottles and leftover french toast bits from breakfast and a Lara bar. Definitely less appealing. By the way, I didn't "forget" the stroller. I wanted her to get some good exercise so she would take an afternoon nap. (Which she did. Two hours!) We saw giraffes, bears, painted dogs, and the sea lions. Her favorite animals were these goldfish, who live in the canal by the elephant exhibit. If you take your kid to see exotic animals and all they want to do is look at some goldfish, well, I think you should just roll with it. We sat there a long time and she pointed them out to everyone who approached the fence. They mostly looked confused by what she was saying because they came to see the baby elephant.

Ask Moxie, one of my favorite mom bloggers, wrote about food rules and kids today. We don't have much in the way of food rules in our house, and I'm not sure how it's working out. We don't have fights about food or dinner time or anything, so I think that makes it a little more peaceful. We generally have healthy food on hand, so that's mostly what she eats. I've been eating meat recently, but she won't touch it. She's a little picky about everything but will devour lentil soup by the bowlful, serves herself a tiny little salad whenever we have it for dinner, and is game enough to try most everything we give her, although she often spits the first bite out.

I recently heard about a mom whose two year old had never eaten refined sugar. Can you sense the waves of guilt that wash over moms everywhere when they hear things like that? We sense that it's something we ought to have been doing and it's too late now and our kids are now destined to have cavities and problems with obesity and it will be All. Our. Fault.

Hold on a second, rewind. The guilt washed over me and then receded immediately.

But seriously, M and I have certainly struggled to find a happy balance of food choice in our home over the last year with adjusting to my dietary concerns and our desire to avoid food that's laced with chemicals or hormones or trucked long distances. No matter what research I read, I always go back to Michael Pollan's "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Right now, I feel like I have a good handle on what to cook and serve and eat. I know what makes my body feel good and bad and how much I need. My only hope is that modeling eating this way would teach Laurel to do the same.

However, I think there's another food rule I need to work on, which is food waste. How can we look deeper into this issue without just a "clean your plate" motto? I just read this interesting piece on food waste and I think this is the next big thing my household has to tackle.