James Proclaims!

Most weekdays I’m not involved in the process of feeding my children. By the time I get home from work, Mrs Proclaims has taken care of the evening meal for them and herself. She hands over parental responsibility to me at that point and disappears into the world of her doctoral studies and I then attempt to multitask by preparing my own repast while simultaneously (and unsuccessfully) trying to stop my children from destroying my home before I can legitimately pack them off to bed and pretend to have some ‘me time’ as I fall asleep in front of the telly.

Weekends are different. On weekends I take care of everyone’s food. Lunch is generally based around the concept of bread, salad, cheese and/or cold meats. Saturday and Sunday evenings I usually do a cooked meal for everyone, which is generally underpinned by roast potatoes, which I do quite well and which everyone enjoys.

During the school holidays though, I do tend to take responsibility for my daughters’ food intake on a daily basis and evening meals can be tricky. I’ll tend to make something along the lines of pasta or curry for Mrs Proclaims and I on the weeknights of the school hols. I know from the outset that neither of my daughters will entertain the notion of eating my home-made tomato-based sauces. This is not because the sauces are bad – far from it. I am nothing if not a gourmand and because I enjoy eating nice food, I have become quite good at making it.

But children tend to have simpler palates and although my daughters are both fairly adventurous for their age, there are limits to how far I can push them out of their comfort zone. And I reason that as long as what they’ve eaten constitutes a balanced meal, then it doesn’t need to be overly complex.

The trick seems to be to feed them in stages. If all the key components are presented at the same time then both will devour the carbs and be less inclined to consume the protein and the veg. But if the components are presented over three smaller courses, then protein and veg will generally be received without too much resistance. By the time Mrs Proclaims and I sit down to eat our spicy/herby sauce based meal, the girls can join us with a plate each of easily accessible carbs and the whole experience can be fairly pleasant.

The carbs take on different forms depending on what I’ve cooked for us – if we have pasta or rice then the girls will have the same. But sometimes Mrs Proclaims and I might opt for a naan bread as we did one night last week. In this case all bets are off and some kind of processed potato produce from the freezer might be the ‘go-to’ for the children. I generally find such things unappetizing but Little Proclaims quite enjoys them and Mini Proclaims can barely contain her glee when presented with potato waffles, oven chips or, as was the case last week, alpha bites.

Little Proclaims was initially a little nonplussed. Her frozen potato product of choice would be the oven chip. So while Mini Proclaims shoved upper-case spuds into her mouth without so much a pause for breath, Little Proclaims was more circumspect in her approach. But, once she’d overcome her disappointment at receiving the wrong kind of beige food, she did look on the bright side. For Little Proclaims is now at a stage in her education whereby she can read and write. And spell fairly accurately too. And she saw the letters on her plate and realised she could make a word. The letters she had were C,T,N,O, and E.

“I can almost make the word ‘cute’,” she said.

Then she bit of the top of the ‘O’ and effectively turned it into a ‘U’.

The letters on her plate were now C,T,N,U, and E.

She spelled the word ‘cute’.

The she rearranged the letters and incorporated the previously unused ‘N’.

She made a few different words.

Well they were mainly ‘non-words’.

She laughed as she made the various combinations and read them aloud.

Mrs Proclaims looked at me. I looked at Mrs Proclaims. We both looked at the letters.

C,T,N,U, and E.

There was a possible combination that our daughter had not yet hit upon.

Our youngest had already eaten almost all of her potato letters.

I played to Little’s competitive instincts and desire for instant gratification.

“You don’t want your sister to finish before you,” I said, “come on, eat up and then you can have some dessert.”

Little Proclaims took the bait. The ‘N’ disappeared into her mouth.

Crisis averted.