What DO They Eat?

I recently mentioned that Ramekin loves to have friends over after school, so I generally allow it once or twice a week if the boys have been behaving fairly reasonably. They come over and play for an hour or so, then I serve a child-friendly dinner to all children present in the house, and then they play or watch a short program on television for half an hour or so before heading home around 6:00.

What I didn’t mention is how incredibly picky most of Ramekin’s friends are when it comes to food. It came as quite a surprise to me, initially, since my boys are pretty good about eating their meals.

I have quickly learned that when you have young children as after-school guests, simple and quick is best; preferably something you won’t feel bad throwing out when they just pick at it. As a result, when we have guest four and five year olds for dinner, I usually go with any of the following: fish fingers; chicken fingers; meatballs; sausages; spaghetti bolognaise; macaroni and cheese; toasted cheese sandwiches; lasagne (store-bought unless someone brings one), as opposed to a more formal family meal. Whatever I go with, I’ll also add noodles or oven-baked chips, and a cooked somewhat child-friendly fresh vegetable or two (corn, carrots, butternut squash, for example) or sliced up cucumbers, tomatoes, etc. And we always have bowls of fresh fruit available. (Any guest parents and I generally pass on the child-fare, but they are welcome to have some, too.) I won’t make a child eat the dinner on offer. But I do require them to eat a fair amount to get a small pudding at these weekly events. To do otherwise would set a bad precedent for my boys as they are actually pretty good eaters and I don’t want either of them to think they could get away with holding out for pudding.

Anyway, Ramekin’s most frequent guest, his best friend ‘C’, is a fairly poor eater. I would say roughly 80% of all dinners are rejected for no apparent reason. I don’t take it personally; his mom, a good friend of mine, says he’s the same way at home and it drives her nuts. Another friend, ‘J’, announced he only ate spiral noodles and wanted to make sure we were having spiral noodles. When friend ‘D’ came with his slightly older brother, the brother inhaled his dinner, just like my boys, as D pushed most of it around his plate; their mother just sighed and said it was typical.

But the most entertaining picky food reaction to date had to be Ramekin’s friend ‘Miss A’ last Friday. Miss A is a lovely little girl in Ramekin’s class who had never been to our house before. Her mom brought her over with her little brother after school. I’d already cleared the meal plan with her mom a couple of days prior: my husband’s excellent homemade macaroni and cheese. Her mom said A would enjoy it. Turns out, not so much. Miss A finally took one miniscule bite of the macaroni and cheese and announced that she didn’t like it; her brother refused to even taste it. Their mom, who is absolutely lovely by the way, encouraged them to give it a real try, but they weren’t having it. So we shrugged and watched my boys work their way through seconds. Until …

And I have to say, if you’ve ever seen the cartoon Charlie and Lola, imagine the posh slightly superior way that Lola speaks…

… as I said, until Miss A asked her mother, in a voice very similar to Lola’s, as she sat in front of her untouched plate: “Mummy, when we go home, can we have a proper dinner?”

I immediately snickered because the five year old audaciousness of the comment was absolutely hysterical, even though her mother looked like she wanted to drop through the floor for a moment.

“It’s what they do,” I laughed after we’d set the little monsters up with a half-hour recording of Dora or Diego.

Anyway, you’d think with the limited culinary success I’ve had with Ramekin’s friends, they’d stop coming over. Instead, ‘C’ is always over. ‘J’ is eager to come back. 'Miss V' is owed another visit. Another friend, ‘T” (who I’m not wild about, frankly), keeps asking Ramekin for an invite and has even approached me himself after school about coming over to play. (I said I’ll try to talk to his mother the next time I see her.) And yet another one, “Miss M”, actually colored some pictures at school on Monday and gave them to Ramekin to take home with him, with instructions to give one to me so I would invite her over, too!

Is this normal? Maybe I’ll take an informal poll tomorrow, seeing as I’ll have a couple of the usual suspects here after school with their moms. I've already promised them meatballs.

sigh