My Third Job
Trying to figure out what to make for dinner is like having a second job. Actually, being a dedicated wife/mother is my second job so figuring out what to make for dinner is technically my third job. While there are only three of us to cook for, we might as well be a family of 10 considering how many likes and dislikes I have to consider at mealtimes.
I’ll admit that I am probably the most demanding what with my 100+ food allergies. Plus I don’t eat meat or chicken and I don’t like to eat too much fish either. That doesn’t leave a whole lot to choose from other than eggs, vegetables, and fruit. I am single-handedly ensuring the livelihood of cage-free organically grown chickens and organically grown zucchini. Anyway, I figure that since I am the one who cooks everything I have a license to be demanding, right?
So we have Maya who doesn’t particularly care for chicken or fish unless it has been battered, salted, breaded, frozen, salted some more, and then defrosted. She doesn’t like hamburgers. She isn’t a huge fan of homemade pizza (not enough grease maybe?) but she’ll go to town on Dominos Pizza. She doesn’t (knowingly) eat lots of vegetables except for broccoli, corn, and sometimes carrots and cucumbers. She is the only child on the planet who doesn’t like potatoes. So what does she eat? Maya could easily live off of bread and cheese. This would be no problem if we lived in Paris but while Ali tries to figure out a way to make a millions so we can live large near St-Germain-des-Prés, I’m trying to get Maya to eat a lot more than just cheese sandwiches.
Ali has come a long way with his eating habits. A few years ago he wouldn’t consider eating a meal that didn’t contain a dead animal. McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut were staples in his diet. Chalupa, anyone? I’m happy to say that these days he will often ask for a vegetarian meal. We have made huge strides! But alas, dinner still isn’t as easy as giving him the same thing I eat. His idea of a vegetarian meal is a giant plate of pasta covered in spaghetti sauce (no parmesan cheese of course as that would be greeted with a “what’s this white stuff” comment). He won’t eat fish unless it involves going to Chili’s and having what he deems the best Tilapia ever. Yes, that’s right, apparently Chili’s has cornered the market on Tilapia. He’ll do vegetables occasionally but they usually need to be covered in some type of oil or sauce and never, ever in their original raw state. Try to hand him a raw carrot and things could get ugly.
So today after picking Maya up from school and taking a short detour to the library where we read 10 Christmas books as she made herself at home:
I immediately came home, put my stuff down, and set to work figuring out dinner. Maya wanted the early bird special, i.e. whatever I could pull together in 5 minutes because apparently “they had pretzels at snack time Mama, and I HATE pretzels.” So at 5:30 Maya had a fried egg, toast, broccoli, and an unpictured orange. Dinner of champions.
She ate the entire thing without complaint.
“Why are you taking pictures of my empty plate Mama?”
“Cause Mom’s nuts, Pokey, that’s why.”
While Maya ate her dinner, I cleaned up her lunch box and started on Ali’s dinner.
Two tortillas with shredded chicken, spinach, mozzarella cheese, and roasted zucchini on the side.
While he devoured his meal Maya played on the Wii for her allotted half an hour. “I want to play the game that breaks things, Daddy.” Lovely.
Meanwhile, I opened the nearly empty fridge praying for a miracle that would deliver me from another egg based dinner. God heard my prayers because I managed to pull together a pretty decent dinner via the freezer:
A TJ’s Salmon patty, roasted zucchini, and tomatoes on my Eiffel Tower plate. I swear everything tastes better on it. I ate in the kitchen with the company of my new library book.
And then yes, you guessed it, I cleaned up the kitchen again.
So this eating in stages thing is really irritating. Making 3 different meals for dinner each night is even more annoying. I don’t want to spend 1 1/2 hours in the kitchen cooking and intermittently cleaning when I could be spending quality time in front of the TV with Maya.
Does anyone else have to make different meals for all members of their household? Any suggestions on how to stop the madness?
How I Kicked My Sugar Habit
When I was younger I wasn’t much of an eater. I could go all day without eating a proper meal. I just had no interest in food and for some strange reason I never even felt hungry. (How I wish that were the case now!) Eventually the lack of food would catch up with me though and there were times I’d be so dizzy that I would black out. This happened at school several times and the nurse called my mom who would then proceed to sit me down and force me to eat.
The interesting thing was that while I wasn’t interested in proper meals I had no problem consuming sugar. For breakfast I’d eat a couple of spoons of ice cream straight from the freezer and then be satisfied until lunch when I’d melt 5 Chips Ahoy cookies in the microwave and have them with a glass of milk. I had a Chips Ahoy addiction. It was terrible. My brother did too actually. My mom would buy a package of Chips Ahoy which had probably 40 cookies or something and it would be gone in 2 days flat. This happened for a couple reasons:
1. They were delicious.
2. I didn’t want my brother to finish them off so I ate as many as I could, as fast as I could. And vice versa.
We even took to hiding cookies in our rooms just so the other person couldn’t have/find them. We had major mental problems. We still do. But that is another post altogether. Anyway, it is amazing that neither of us gained 500 pounds during this vicious cookie-eating cycle.
As I got older things didn’t really change too much except that my Chips Ahoy addiction was replaced with mass consumption of Chips Deluxe cookies which in turn led to a Magic Middles problem. (Why, oh why did they stop making Magic Middles??) Throughout high school my daily lunch was a King Size Snickers and a Dr. Pepper. Well balanced, huh? During college I went through a containers of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Brownie ice cream. And then when I met my husband I started drinking tons of Coke and Pepsi, as he is a huge fan. Sometimes I’d have a Coke and 8-10 cookies and I felt like I could have easily eaten 8-10 more. I might as well have been hooked up to an IV of sugar, that’s how much I was consuming. Miraculously I never gained an ounce and so I never really thought of it as a problem.
When I was pregnant with Maya the doctor told me I needed to watch out because I could potentially develop gestational diabetes. So I cut out the Coke and tried to cut back on the cookies. I don’t think I was as successful as the doctor had hoped but at least I stopped craving soft drinks and I didn’t get gestational diabetes!
After Maya was born I lost all the pregnancy weight in a week and went right back to my mass consumption of sugar as if 9 months hadn’t passed. I figured that since I didn’t have a weight problem it really didn’t matter what I ate, right? Plus, I was SO in over my head with a newborn that the only thing that made me feel better was drowning my sorrows in a bag of 2-Bite Brownies during the 5 minutes Maya managed to sleep.
These things are like crack I tell you!
One month before Maya turned one, I turned 30. I swear my metabolism changed overnight. I didn’t have a working scale so I really had no idea how much I weighed, but I could tell that my jeans were getting tight and I felt like I’d gained some weight. Since I was skinny, this wouldn’t have been a problem except that the weight was all focused around my stomach. Subcutaneous fat, someone told me, which according to Dr. Oz is the worst type. I was that dreaded skinny and yet fat person and I had no idea how to deal with it.
Turning 30 also coincided with me trying to get through by first year at CBS. I was juggling a one-year-old, a new job, a move to a new condo. And then our first nanny, who was a total B@#$%, quit on us with no notice. (One day Karma will take care of you Nanny!) I didn’t know how to deal with everything that was going on. I was just getting everything done by the skin of my teeth. The highlight of my day was the small window of time after work when Maya had just gone to sleep and I could watch America’s Next Top Model and chow down on something sugary. I knew it was a terrible habit but I just couldn’t stop myself. I continued to feel like my pants were getting tight though so I decided to start going to the gym earnestly. I woke up at 5am every day and went to the gym for an entire hour before Maya woke up. I killed myself (and in the process my knee) by blazing miles on the treadmill, the elliptical, and the stationary bike. I hired a trainer. I hardly ate anything. But after dinner I still ate 6 brownie bites with a glass of milk. Every. Single. Night.
I was so frustrated with myself! I like to think of myself as having a ton of motivation to get things done but I just couldn’t give up my after dinner dessert habit. My low point came one Father’s Day when my brother and I took my dad to dinner at Morton’s and after eating lobster mashed potatoes and a Caesar salad, I still came home and ate dessert even though I didn’t really want it! I felt SO disgusting that I knew I had to do something drastic.
The next day I tossed out the brownie bites and the cookies. Instead I told myself I could have some of Maya’s graham crackers. So I had graham crackers. Except that I still ate about 5 of them and that kind of defeated the purpose of cutting out not just the sugar but the bad habit of dessert as well. So I threw those out too and bought mini-Snickers instead. I told myself that I could have up to 2 mini-Snickers every day after dinner. Well it had been a while since I’d eaten a Snickers and my face broke out SO terribly the next day that yes I threw those out too.
As I tried to figure out what to do next I realized it was time for Maya to stop drinking from a bottle. A couple of days after her first birthday I tossed all the bottles in the trash and gave her milk in a sippy cup. She looked at me and I looked at her and she screamed for the entire first day without a bottle. I stuck firm though and by the next day she was happily drinking from a sippy cup. That was when I realized that I had to use the same strategy – as an all or nothing kind of person I needed to cut myself off of sugar completely in order to eliminate it.
The first few days were terribly difficult but I told myself I had to go sugar-free for 2 entire weeks. (I’d read somewhere that it takes 2 weeks to break a habit). I snacked on grapes and raisins after dinner just to keep myself from going crazy. I also tried not to turn the TV on and instead went on the computer, or better yet, went to bed earlier just to stay away from the sugar. At the end of the first week I was in a much better place. I still wanted something after dinner but it wasn’t that difficult to talk myself out of it. By the end of the second week I had absolutely NO need for sugar.
To celebrate I picked up a piece of Godiva Chocolate Tower Truffle Cake from Cheesecake Factory. Brilliant, right? But guess what? After a couple of bites it was it was TOO sweet for me. I couldn’t believe it. My husband (who doesn’t work out and eats a ton of junk) would often comment after a few bites of dessert that it was too much for him. I would just stare at him like he was crazy because nothing was ever too sugary or too chocolately for me. But after my 2 week sugar detox I finally understood what he meant.
It has been a couple of years now since I managed to kick my habit and I’m happy to say that I’ve been able to stay on the right track. I rarely eat dessert now but I do indulge in some quality dark chocolate – a couple of squares though and I am totally satisfied. Any more than that and I kind of feel shaky and slightly nauseous AND my face breaks out. (Whoever says that what you eat has no effect on your skin has no idea what they are talking about because once I cut out the sugar, my skin instantly improved. It is not perfect by any means but it is still 100% better than it used to be. I am also not spending a fortune at the dermatologist anymore).
I’m not going to lie…I miss the brownies and the cookies and the indulging with friends/family. I hate that people think I am uptight and too strict because I changed my eating habits for the better. But anytime I feel like I’m going to give in I try to think of how gross I’ll feel afterwards and I swear it works every time.
Has/does anyone else face a sugar addition? How did you get past it?
Panda-monium
The weekend went by in a flash…I am proud to say we kept Maya so busy that last night she slept 12 hours straight and didn’t wake up until 8am this morning. That has never happened before in her 4 1/2 years on this planet.
It all started Saturday morning when we headed to Borders for the Panda-monium event. Apparently there is a famous panda named Beckett. We’d never heard of him before but it didn’t matter because Maya was mesmerized for an entire hour and that’s all that counts.
Storytime, snacks, free books, a Santa hat AND Maya won a panda!
Borders, you rock. Thank you for helping us entertain our child every Saturday. I promise to actually buy something one of these days.
After exploiting story time we headed to my parent’s place for some more help with keeping Maya busy. My mom cooked up a storm and thank God for that because I only really eat properly when she cooks for me.
Peas, cauliflower, tomatoes, all Indian style, all gluten-free. It was delicious. Such a shame I never learned how to cook Indian food.
I didn’t get to eat this Apple Cake (obviously) but I had to share a picture because my Mom made it from scratch. It was stunning, or at least it was before Maya tried to murder it.
Afterwards we killed some time at my in-laws place and then headed to dinner at an Indian restaurant. Sorry, I forgot to take pictures!
This morning Maya and I were busy with a flurry of preparations for a baby shower we attended this evening. We started the morning with glue, scraps of wrapping paper, and construction paper.
Each person wrote advice for the new mom on the cards we made. People said the cards were cute. They may have just said that to be polite but in any case, the cards weren’t too shabby coming from a completely non-creative person like myself.
After arts & crafts time was over Maya and I made brownies for the party. I am embarrassed to say we took a little help from Betty Crocker again. I contemplated making homemade brownies but I knew this was a crowd who preferred some trans-fat.
At least I used cage-free organic eggs, right? Regardless of the good eggs, I still wouldn’t touch the trans-fat filled brownies with a ten foot pole. Despite the fact they smelled and looked delicious.
The secret to perfectly cut brownies? Freeze them for an hour and then cut using a non-serrated knife. After years of butchered brownies I finally figured this out. I am a slow learner.
It was freezing cold so Maya didn’t wear her usual party dress attire but decked herself out in Juicy instead. She insisted on modeling for a picture. How shallow is my child?
Naturally the overpriced Juicy sweat suit came from her grandmother as I only buy Maya Target’s finest.
Maya could barely contain her excitement as we headed to the shower. My daughter sits like a lady, doesn’t she?
Our brownies and games were a hit and now we are back home recovering from our non-stop weekend. The best part of the weekend? We managed to get through 2 whole days with no barf.
Now that’s what I call success!
While I'm not going to win Mother/Wife of the Year Award anytime soon, I haven't killed anyone yet or shot myself in the head. And that, my friends, is how I calculate success these days. 
FANCY THAT FANCY THIS 
