The best excuse for not eating vegetables…

Not eating vegetables!

Now my boys, like all boys, are not overly keen on vegetables and trying to get them to eat their statutory five a day is a task that would make even Hercules struggle.
But I don’t give up that easily and nor, am I afraid, do my boys.
They are ever on the lookout for excuses not to eat fruit and vegetables particularly ones they dislike. Obviously I try not to give them food I know they hold in abhorrence but just sometimes I feel it is good for their souls to be forced to eat something a little out of the ordinary or something that I truly believe they will enjoy some day.
I am not a sadist, I don’t force them to eat foods that I know they detest all the time, just occasionally, so that they get the idea that they should just get on with it. Nothing is more painful and embarrassing that when you take your child to a restaurant or to someone else’s house and they kick up a fuss about the stray Brussels sprout that is totally out of proportion to the situation. And you land up in a fierce whispering row about the fact that they should eat it because it is rude not to and then your host or the restaurant manager says its fine and not to worry but you’ve cornered yourself and it becomes a matter of principal and the whole meal/occasion is ruined and will be forever remembered as “The time when Mum blew her top over a Brussels Sprout and we got barred from the restaurant/were never got invited back again”.
There are times I look in askance at those hosts who serve up Brussels Sprouts/broad beans to children - it is almost as if they don’t like you…
Anyway back to the boys and the novel ways they engineer to get out of eating food they don’t like or at least think they don’t like because half the time you just know they have never even tasted the stuff before.
Now Bog Boy, at the grand old age of six, has taken to not bothering to go to the loo if there is something more important happening such as playing on the Wii/Nintendo/iPod or even playing on the trampoline and I get the jolly task of having to deal with his pants and the skid marks.
It is not pleasant and he and I have been having a running battle of wills all through the summer. He fails to make it to the loo and I threatened to put him back in nappies. Invariably I lose.
So when we were in Wet Welsh Wales he had another accident while we were out by the rock pools and I blew my top saying that that was it he was going back into nappies and he’d have to deal with it himself.
“But it’s all your fault Mummy!”
“Why on earth is it my fault? You are the one who has pooed his pants!”
“You make me eat tomatoes!”
Of course I did! Silly me! In my quest for healthier eating I had decided that all of us should eat tomatoes on a daily basis. Each boy should eat two baby plum tomatoes at lunchtime and as far as I was concerned they could smother the wretched things in mayonnaise just so long as they were eaten. I won that battle.
So there I am on the beach and he’s hollering at me.
“You make me eat tomatoes and they are poison.”
“How on earth can they be poisonous?”
“They are! They are making me go to the loo quicker so it is your fault that I poo in my pants!!”
“What!”
“Eating vegetables makes you go to the poo and you making me eat tomatoes is making me poo quicker so I don’t have enough time to go to the loo properly! You should NOT make me eat vegetables.”
He was so adamant and so very, very cross with me that I couldn’t help it, I burst out laughing and no, he didn’t have to eat any more tomatoes; I am still standing firm n vegetables though!