daddy night

Here is something I don’t understand – FOOD. I just don’t get food okay? So sue me. Sometimes when I’m trying to decide what to eat I don’t have a problem having French fries with my baked potatoes. I mean really – what is the big deal? I like food, I really do. But sometimes it just isn’t that big a deal to me if I have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich every day of the week for every meal. Sure I don’t feel like running a marathon or riding a bike but my stomach is full and as long as I have some ibuprofen I can fend off a headache and life can move on. I don’t really like waiting for food either. Once it is time to eat…IT IS TIME TO EAT. This occasionally has its problems when there is no food around or like when we used to go on vacation with my mother-in-law who could go days without eating in order to squeeze in a little more Monet or redwoods or bike ride or something.

Most of the time this problem (the needing to eat now problem that is) is manageable. The other problem however (the I don’t know what foods go together problem,) is still tough. This brings me to Thursday nights. Thursday night is daddy night. Not understanding food is not really a problem for me but when innocent children are involved I feel a little more self-conscious about the problem. Marie works Thursday nights and so I’m in charge. I can handle bed time, I can handle play time, but I can’t handle dinner time. So I usually punt. On the receiving end of the punt is usually someone named Ronald or Wendy but now and then I like to mix things up and head a little further south to one of the little known fine restaurants in this valley. IKEA! I love Swedish meatballs. Seriously – I love them. A lot. They are certainly in the category of being able to eat them every day. So one night recently after the official kid handoff that sometimes makes me feel like a divorced dad we decided to break the McDonald’s cycle and head out to Ikea for some meatballs. Everything was going great. We got the meatballs, we were sitting down to eat when Laine declares she cannot eat hers. I asked why and she explained to me that she didn’t like all that heavenly gravy touching her meatballs. Just as any good dad would I picked one up with minimal gravy and wiped it with a napkin. “not good enough” she declared. I examined the meatball, contemplated my options and then promptly popped it into my mouth, sucked off the gravy and gave the meatball back.

Apparently this is exactly the result that Lainey was looking for. Now feeling satisfied she ate the meatball. This leads me to something else I don’t really understand very well. Four year old girls. She won’t eat her bread if it has touched her meat. She won’t eat her noodles if Romney has touched them…but she will eat anything I lick clean. I distinctly remember in school when you wanted someone to NOT touch or eat something of yours…..you licked it! This is how things are done. But for Lainey she is just the opposite. It must be licked clean in order to acceptable. This was proven once again tonight as we sat at McDonalds, back in our routine eating our chicken nuggets. Laine was finishing off her ketchup one finger lick at a time when I suggested she use one of Romney’s uneaten nuggets. She said okay, grabbed in but noticed just in the nick of time that there was a small dot of Romney ketchup on one side. At this point it was declared unclean and unusable. I appealed to reason and failed (duh.) She asked me to lick it clean for her so what was I supposed to do? I had no choice really. I licked it clean and sent her on her merry little ketchup-dipping way. She ate the whole thing. Hopefully someday I’ll understand enough about food to be able to think of something for dinner when we come home but for now it looks like I’m going to have to just keep licking my daughters food clean and spending my Thursday evenings hoping the kid that just climbed out of the slide in the playland soaking wet didn’t really just pee all over the whole thing.