Am I doing this right?

As I watched Emmalee eating fast food chicken nuggets for the second evening in a row, I couldn’t help but have one of those “am I doing this right?” moments in parenting.  Of course I know that there are healthier things she could be eating than chicken nuggets, particularly the fried fast food variety.  But when I got home from work today I had to get her ready and then run to Sam’s Club to pick up my contacts and Wal-Mart to buy a few essentials that I forgot to pick up the last time I was there.  Wal-Mart just so happens to be located right next to a very convenient Chick-fil-A, whose chickeny goodness sounded pretty fast and easy at 6:15 pm.  I scarfed my food down on the drive home so that I’d be free to set Emma up in her high chair and then unload the car and put the groceries away while she munched.  It was a busy evening.  At least I put some peas and carrots (microwaved, from a can) on her tray.  Not that she ate them. 

I am allowing Emma to learn some pretty terrible eating habits.  Though she loves fruit, she is not a fan of vegetables.  She loves anything fried and buttery, and she would happily graze on snacks like Puffs and Cheerios all day long.  She is pretty much following right in my gastronomic footsteps, except I substitute the Puffs and Cheerios for chips and chocolate.  Should I really expect anything different?

To be fair, it’s not like she eats fast food three times a day, or even everyday for that matter.  And she does eat some healthier things, like peanut butter and applesauce sandwiches, fruit cups, and mixed grain Gerber cereal mixed with a stage two Gerber fruit (her daily breakfast).  But I’m pretty sure that everything she consumes is processed, preserved, or artificial in some way.  Her veggies come from cans.  Her fruit comes from a disposable cup with a peel-back lid.  And a large chunk of her daily caloric intake is of the Teddy Graham and Goldfish variety.  She also drinks juice, which I thought was a good thing until a recent Babycenter.com thread informed me that it’s full of sugar and evil, right up there with milk apparently.  At least I water it down.  And who am I to worry about sugar when I share my ice cream with her? 

The reason that Emma and I both eat this way is that I do not cook.  I feel lost in the kitchen, and the idea of having to prepare a meal each evening makes me feel like taking a nap, especially when considering trying to cook with a whiny, hungry toddler attached to my legs.  Are there really people out there who do that?  Babycenter.com’s message boards would have you believe that they not only exist, but that they prepare these meals using all natural, unprocessed organic ingredients.  At the risk of sounding cynical, what do these people do all day that they have the time for that crap?  If you are someone who falls into this category, hats off to you.  Seriously.  I admire you’re dedication.  But I don’t feel like cooking.  And I don’t feel like reading labels.  And I don’t feel like changing my own eating habits.  So I guess Emma is doomed to a childhood of cereal, sandwiches and dinners that can either be prepared in ten minutes or less or that can be served through a window.  Somehow I doubt she’ll complain.  And anyway, we can probably get a home cooked meal out of Grammy once in a while.  Isn’t that what grandmothers are for?

I discuss this topic flippantly, but the fact that I’m blogging about it betrays the reality of the situation which is that I have guilt.  I want to be a good mom and I want Emma to be a healthy child.  I know that serving grilled cheese or chicken nuggets most nights, and allowing Emma to munch on Cheerios to keep her quiet when we’re shopping, is taking the easy way out.  I also know that if I whine about being busy or tired or having to do it all on my own I am just making excuses.  But since I’m not all that willing to make changes, my guilt must not be too bad.  I guess I feel like if I’ve eaten this way for as long as I can remember and I’m all right, then Emma will probably be fine too.  Maybe I can try to be extra awesome in some other area of parenting to make up for my lack of awesomeness at mealtimes?  Maybe I think about these things too much.

Dinner Served

Feeding Emmalee has been a concern for me since pretty much the moment she was born.  I had what I feel was a very traumatic birth experience.  I was induced, labored for 19 hours, and then was told that because of my oversensitivity to the Pitocin my uterus had swelled and I would need a cesarean section.  The epidural gave me severe chills and when Emmalee was officially removed from my body at 8:30 pm I had been awake for more than 36 hours.  I also ended up developing shingles from the stress of my experience.  As I lay in the recovery room, convulsing and so tired my vision was blurry, a nurse asked me if I would like to breastfeed my baby now.  I don’t know if this makes me awful, but I did not want to breastfeed her.  I didn’t really even want to look at her.  I just wanted to pile about thirty blankets on top of me and go to sleep. 

That moment was the beginning of the end of breastfeeding for us.  We also had latching issues and had to supplement with formula almost right away because Emmalee wasn’t gaining weight.  And to top it off, breastfeeding made me feel physically ill.  That’s probably incredibly weird, but I would get dizzy and feel nauseas every time I had to do it.  So by three weeks old breastfeeding was history, but my concerns over Emmalee eating had just begun. 

I’ve always worried incessantly about whether or not Emmalee is eating enough or too much.  For months I kept a daily log recording the time of each feeding and how many ounces she consumed.  When she started on cereal and baby food I painstakingly measured and worried over portion size, following a recommended feeding schedule from Gerber to make sure she was getting the proper amount of fruits and vegetables and iron fortified goodness each and every day.  Luckily my apprehensiveness has mostly been unnecessary because Emmalee has always been an excellent eater.  That may have contributed to her remaining in the 95^th percentile or higher at every doctor visit.  Once she got the hang of eating from a spoon, it didn’t matter what was on the spoon she was opening wide for it.  She loved every vegetable and fruit I introduced, and when it was time to start on stage 3 dinners she didn’t even flinch.  She loves snacks.  Puffs, Cheerios, Teddy Grahams and Goldfish are her favorites.  I thought that with all the sleep trouble we’ve had and tantrums we’ve survived, at the very least I can say I don’t have to deal with a picky eater.

And then, a little over a week ago, Emmalee became picky.  She seems to have decided that she is through with baby food.  She still eats her cereal mixed with fruit in the mornings, and here and there I can get a stage two veggie in her, but she absolutely refuses the dinners now.  So I’ve been scrambling a bit.  It is probably fortunate that I can’t afford to be a stay at home mom because I am not the slightest bit domestic.  I hate cleaning and I despise cooking.  For me, cooking is using the microwave.  If I want to go all out, I might pop open a box of Hamburger Helper or boil some pasta for spaghetti, but that honestly hasn’t happened since well before Emma was born.  It was incredibly convenient to be able to open a jar of Gerber and viola, dinner served.  But those days are over and I am now faced with the whole new challenge of figuring out how to make sure Emma is getting the nutrition she needs from the meals I’m capable of preparing. 

Feeding Emmalee what I eat is not really the best option, though she would certainly disagree.  I am a terrible eater.  I consume much more fast food, take-out, chips, cookies, donuts, and other junk food than a person ever should.  How I am not 300 pounds I do not know.  But Emma will certainly not get a well-balanced diet traveling down that road.  So we are embarking on a new journey, trying to find a balance between my desire to not have to cook and my desire to provide Emmalee with the nutrition she requires.  Thank goodness for Gerber Graduates or I don’t know how we would survive. 

Got Milk?

Becoming a new mom can be overwhelming, particularly if you are concerned with being a very good mom.  If you have this concern, you will likely spend a great deal of your prenatal time reading books and “Google-ing,” as I did.  What will then happen to you is this: you will have an overload of contradicting information and your brain will explode.  Okay, maybe not explode.  But you will no longer remember what you believe and you will spend countless middle of the night hours wondering what parts of the information you’ve acquired are important and what parts should be discarded.  What can you do to lower the risk of SIDS?  Should you co-sleep?  Should you use a bassinet or put the baby in the crib right away?  Should you wear your baby?  (This is a real thing, look it up.)  Should you use cloth or disposable diapers?  Is it okay that you don’t want to breastfeed?  What kind of bottles/pacifiers/diapers/wipes/etc are best?  As your baby gets older you’ll wonder, should I make homemade baby food or use store bought?  What’s organic and why do I care?  Is my baby getting enough formula?  Will I ever sleep a full night again?  Is cry it out the answer?  How much baby proofing is truly necessary?

Clearly, there is a lot to consider.  But a recent thread on Babycenter.com’s message boards really threw me for a loop.  On this thread there were mothers who claimed that it was harmful to give your child milk.  Yes, that’s right, milk.  They weren’t arguing about coffee, or poison, or vodka.  They were arguing about milk.  According to these women, milk is a dangerous and harmful substance that should be avoided at all costs.  It is full of antibiotics (aren’t those good?) and hormones and has been linked to frequent ear infections and even certain types of cancer.  These same women also believe that formula “more than doubles” the chance of infant death. 

Really?  As if there aren’t enough things to terrify mothers these days, now we have to fear milk?  What happened to milk being full of calcium and Vitamin D?  The good ‘ole days when milk-mustached celebrities wanted to know if we had any?  Preventing osteoporosis?  None of that rings a bell? 

Generations of human beings have been raised on milk, and most of us turned out to be relatively okay.  I say enough.  We cannot raise our children ruled by fear of giving them cancer.  Is this really the message we want to send to the newest generation; that everything we encounter is tainted and should be treated with trepidation?  Yes, there are germs.  Yes, there are things that cause cancer.  No, the world is not a perfect place.  But if we let fear rule our lives we will be missing out on the chance to live.  I’m not saying throw caution to the wind in every circumstance.  I’m just saying that as parents we need to take a deep breath and relax before our children end up in psychiatric offices getting prescriptions for Xanax because they are so fearful of the world that they can no longer function.  The anxieties over doing what is best for our children have to stop somewhere.  I vote that they stop with milk.

                                             (Yes, we're doing editorial shots now.)