Choosy mice choose Jif. If only it were that easy to feed children.

Caught our first mouse today. Seeing it there with 2/3 of its body hanging out the back and upside down almost evoked sympathy from me and made up for all the skeeviness of yesterday. There is at least one more down there. I almost hate to waste the peanut butter on it. At least the mice aren’t picky.

Which is more than I can say for my children recently. Granted, I have about the least picky children I know, but they have their limits, and apparently I have found them. Flipping through my recipes, I decided to make sesame peanut noodles. Who doesn’t like sesame peanut noodles? My kids. I understand that people prefer some foods more than others but life is not a medium rare steak and garlic mashed potatoes every night. Once or twice a year, sure. Life is not a grilled chicken caesar salad, either, which is another favorite.

Today a cold, hard reality hit me: we are starting school very soon and I won’t have time to be chopping and stirring and sauteing for hours every afternoon. All of a sudden memories of last summer came back, when we were in the farm and I was having to use up insane amounts of onions, squash, potatoes, and melon. Nope, I need recipes that my children will eat, that are healthful, easy to make, economical to purchase, and occasionally conform to the fasting guidelines of my church. After the children turned up their noses at peanut noodles, I told them they were welcome to the job of meal planning, given those requirements. I got no takers.

Ideally, I would like my children to eat what they are served. We are pretty flexible with lunch and breakfast here and each person usually gets what they’d like. But dinner is different. They will come into the kitchen and ask, “What’s for dinner?” And I will tell them, whereupon they will either skip away joyfully or try to conceal their displeasure. They aren’t very good at it, and I usually react. Sometimes I say, “I’m just making something else you aren’t going to eat.”

I usually don’t do a lot of cooking on weekends, so tonight John was making dinner. An hour he is in there making tabboleh (turns out he used my old recipe, more complicated than my new recipe). I go in and help him and my daughter asks, “May I make macaroni and cheese for William and me?” “Oh no…no, no, no, no, no. It’s one thing to be a snot and not eat what I make, but your father has been in here an hour. I should send you to your room with no dinner at all. Besides, I thought you liked falafel.” “I do like falafel.” “Well, then.” And she disappeared into the black hole of her room. For the record, I don’t agree with letting children who don’t like what they are served eat something different, even if they make it themselves. That seems wrong on so many levels to me.

Truth is, there are a lot of things I don’t cook because I know my children don’t like them, and I miss those dishes. But I can only handle so much spaghetti and burritos. They think I am trying to be mean. Which is completely untrue, because if I were mean, I’d just put some peanut butter into a little device that chopped their heads off when they tried to reach it.