Free Ketchup Is a Vegetable: And Other Lies Moms Tell Themselves by Robin O'Bryant Page B

smug when your baby eats vegetables at first. You will pay. Do you hear me? It will bite you right in the butt. My oldest child went from eating anything I stuck in her mouth to refusing just about everything I fed her. For years . She got real particular, real fast. I tried talking to other moms about it, but I made a huge miscalculation and ended up talking to the Alpha Mom in Aubrey’s preschool class. (You know the one, she struggles just like you do, but she’ll never give you the satisfaction of knowing it.)
     
    We were having a Christmas party for their two-year-old class and one of the moms had brought a vegetable tray. Because, you know, nothing screams “party time” to a room full of toddlers like raw broccoli and cherry tomatoes. I say if we’re going to call this a party, give ‘em pizza and cupcakes. Let's really turn this mutha out, but nobody asked me.
     
    Alpha Mom’s little boy was chowing down on the veggie tray. This kid was eating broccoli, carrots, cucumbers and tomatoes. Raw . This was unprecedented toddler behavior. I was in awe.
     
    I sidled up to his mom and whispered, “HOW do you get him to eat vegetables like that?”
     
    I knew I had asked the wrong woman as soon as the words were out of my mouth. She all but had a sign on her forehead declaring, “I KNEW I WAS A BETTER MOTHER THAN YOU!” But it was too late, I had released my words into the universe and now I had to listen to what this idiot had to say.
     
    “Well,” she began, with a smirk I wanted to knock off of her face. “I tell him that the cucumber slices are wagon wheels and the broccoli is little trees. He even eats green beans! I tell him they are green French fries and he dips them in ketchup!” She smiled broadly. She was proud, of herself and her child.
     
    “I wish my kid was that stupid, but unfortunately my child is smart enough to tell the difference between a green bean and a French fry,” I thought to myself and at my house, ketchup is a vegetable.
     
    Alpha Mom wasn’t near as smug at her child’s birthday party a few weeks later. He was wearing a cast on his left leg and limping.
     
    “What in the world happened to him?” I asked, truly concerned.
     
    Alpha Mom flushed redder than a cherry tomato. Before she could speak, her mother-in-law quipped, “She run him over in the driveway.” Oh. My. Lanta. I hope I never know that level of Mommy guilt.
     
    Rather than eat healthy, vitamin-enriched McNuggets, my own kids developed a love for non-food items, such as sand, charcoal, ashes and dirt. When Aubrey was eighteen-months-old, she ate ashes out of our fireplace and charcoal out of the grill on the same day (while her father was in charge of her, I might add). That’s when I got online to do some research. She had to have some sort of PICA disorder, a vitamin deficiency most common in pregnant women who crave and eat things like laundry detergent and dirt. But my search was in vain and I couldn’t find any information on an actual disorder.
     
    My husband stood over my shoulder while I asked Dr. Google saying, “Don’t worry, it’s good for her. It’s like a vaccine.”
     
    I’m trying to avoid my child getting a tapeworm or some disgusting disease and he thinks she’s being vaccinated . Please.
     
    I resorted to desperate measures to keep her from eating things that were not meant to be digested. I bought her an ice cream cone at the beach as an alternative to eating sand. When the child actually spit out ice cream to put more sand in her mouth I realized I was defeated. There was just no helping a kid who would actually spit out cold and creamy ice cream on a hot day at the beach in order to eat sand . I could discourage her, but unless I wanted to spend the next year freaking out every time she put something in her mouth, I was going to have to relax. We lived ten minutes from the Atlantic Ocean, either I had to adjust or we had to stay in the house.
     
    On our next day at the