Salt and Straw

For the love of God, please eat your dinner

~ Randy Blazak ~ 8 Comments

April 27, 2017

My kid could live on Mac and Cheese and chocolate ice cream. In fact, she’d prefer it. She’d happily go into diabetic shock, with some macaroni falling out her mouth while watching Mickey and the Roadster Racers. But she ain’t going out like that. Not if I can help it.

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We’ve entered a new phase where Cozy does not want to eat meals. At two-years and eight-months-old she’s asserting her independence by driving us crazy at dinner time. The other night we were trying to get her to eat some wholesome chicken soup and we got as far as getting a spoonful in her mouth but she refused to swallow it. In fact, she walked right into her time-out corner and stared at us, like Robert De Niro in Cape Fear, soup in mouth. “I can see you, parents.”

She’s programmed for maximum sugar intake. If we go through the bakery section at the grocery store, her eyes swell up like a muppet child. She’d sell her soul to Satan for chocolate pudding and turn her mother over to ICE for a lollipop. I feel like I should just hand her a two-pound bag of sugar and let her max-out. It doesn’t help that we live one block from the famous Salt & Straw Ice Cream shop. Anytime we walk out the front door the creamery GPS kicks in and she takes off for a scoop of fudge brownie. Remember when she couldn’t walk? Now I’m chasing her down the street.

I know she gets her sweet tooth from me. I was raised on pie and Now & Laters. My mom got me to eat my carrots by smothering them in brown sugar and my sweet potatoes by baking them with marshmallows. The healthy stuff I wasn’t interested in as a kid. I would sit at the dinner table for hours, staring at a my beets, acting like Gandhi on a hunger strike. (Now, I can’t get enough of yummy beets.) But I’d eat giant bowls of Apple Jacks and slurp down the orange milk afterwards. There’s something in the book of Genesis about the sins of the father being visited upon the children. Well, they got that one fucking right.

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Don’t get me wrong. Cozy likes some healthy foods. Baby carrots, (until recently) peaches, and, I’m sure there’s something else. Vanilla yogurt. She was into strawberries until they started making her itch (or she thinks that they do because we were talking about food allergies one day). I mean there are worse things than peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and quesadillas, right? (I just realized that queso + tortilla = quesadilla.) She takes her vitamins and pops a few grapes during the day so I don’t think she’s gonna need UNICEF to save her but it’s got mom and dad kinda concerned.

The online research helps. Apparently many toddlers have a dip in calorie intake after the explosion of growth their first two years. And they won’t starve to death, they’re more like grazing college kids than three-meal-a-day adults. But my daughter is pretty sophisticated otherwise, so is it wrong for me to want her to already have a favorite sushi roll instead of demanding another cheese stick and handful of goldfish crackers? I’d be happy if she just ate spaghetti. What kid doesn’t like spaghetti? Mine.

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I called my mom and asked for help. It seems that I wasn’t too different than Cozy at this age. Her solution was to cover the healthy food in pudding. (I don’t know why I’m not 3000 pounds.) I think Cozy would see right through that ruse. “Hey, man, why is there chicken in my chocolate pudding?”

Meal time is starting to become a struggle. “I don’t want apple sauce. I want a chocolate bunny!” I think that since she now acts like a little person, we expect her to eat what we’re eating. I get that this is a developmental phase but I’m ready for her to discover the joys of a nice omelette. This is Oregon, she better be woofing down the chanterelles and chinook salmon on wild rice by age three. At the moment, it’s time out with a spoonful of RiceARoni melting in her mouth.

But it’s getting better. We’re trying to be more laissez-faire at meal time instead of hovering over her. You know, we’re just chilling, eating some tacos. And Andrea got a great recipe for sopa de letras (alphabet soup) from her mom that Cozy’s been gobbling down. She’ll eat spaghetti if I tell her it’s worms and I had similar success getting her to (finally) eat turkey dogs by pretending they were fingers. (OK, our kid is weird.) Maybe a portobello burger is in her near future.

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The great thing about parenting is that nobody is the first to do it. There’s a whole bunch of experience floating around out there and good folks who are happy to share their wisdom of what works. So the point of this blog is to get some evidence-based practices that don’t involve coating each meal with chocolate frosting or bribing a child endlessly. (“How can you have your pudding if you don’t eat your meat?”) How do I go from the meal-time showdown to a happy family happily full of beans? Don’t panic, she won’t starve. Help me please.

What drugs go well with a toddler?

~ Randy Blazak ~ 3 Comments

October 26, 2016

I’ve learned that you need three things if you have a two-year-old. You need plenty of rags, a subscription to Netflix (for Beat Bugs), and lots of drugs. Lots of drugs if you want to survive even a day. My drug of choice is caffeine, but I’m in the market for something more appropriate for my needs as a stay-at-home dad.

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The first order of business in the morning, before I can even look my daughter in the face, is to get the pot dripping the black gold. Lately, my dealer has been a Portland roaster called Kobos. Their Ethiopia Yirgacheffe blend is like a spike in to my vein.I pour that first cup, half of it spills on the kitchen floor and I don’t even care. I’ll keep the java flowing through her breakfast in a high chair (with Cheerios hitting the kitchen floor in a Portland version of the fountain show at Bellagio), and the trip to take Mom into work. On good days, we’ll drive-through Starbucks on the way, where I’ll beg them not to put a plastic stopper in my latte and pray that no Stumptown Coffee loyalists spot me crouched behind the steering wheel like a junkie cheating on his supplier.

When the coffee pot is empty there’s always another on deck. And it tends to go quick. I think Cozy is stealing slurps from my Star Trek Enterprise mug when I’m not looking. It’s my fault. When she was a baby, I’d let her smell everything at the grocery store as we shopped, including the dark roast beans. Now, instead of screaming, “Cilantro!” she yells. “Coffee!” It’s really quite cute/embarrassing.

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In the beginning, it was out of necessity. Everyone knows new parents don’t get much sleep. When I was a punk rock teenager, we used to get coffee at an all-night diner in Atlanta called The Majestic, just to come down from a night of terrorizing the city. Same thing with a newborn. But it changed when Cozy turned two. Last August, about a week after her birthday she had a meltdown in the Mexico City airport. She wasn’t going anywhere. I remember thinking, “I need something stronger.” As Huey Lewis once horribly sang, “I want a new drug.”

Just the “Do you need to poop or not?” question is enough to put me on prescription pain meds.

So I’m open to suggestions.

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I know five states are voting on recreational marijuana on Election Day. We’ve had that here in Oregon since last year and it’s been a huge success. I’m not much of a pot smoker but I went to my neighborhood weed shop and bought a bag just because I could. On the way home, I waved it at a cop and he just smiled. Edibles are more fun, but pot generally makes me sleepy and I wanna be ready if I have to do some kiddie CPR or find her always lost copy of The Cat in the Hat. Plus, I’m working off the baby weight and don’t need to be spending my days with the munchies, eating blocks of cheese or the corners off of The Cat in the Hat (Cozy’s already done that).

Methamphetamine seems more practical than heroin or LSD. There’s never enough time in the day to get the chores done and I’ve heard speed freaks have super clean houses. That might be because they’ve sold everything off. (Has anybody told people on that show Hoarders about this?) But I’m kinda vain and would like to keep as much hair on my head and as many teeth in my mouth as possible. On the plus side, we could probably cancel the diaper service because I would be washing them out myself, probably on our front porch in my underwear.

It seems like ecstasy makes the most sense. The Love Drug. You just want to give free hugs when you’re on X. But then I think I’m already on it. There is some endorphin wave that seeps out my brainstem into my entire body whenever I look at my daughter. Yesterday a worker at the gym asked her, “So what’s your name?” And she answered, “Cozy!” It was the first time she ever said she was her name. I melted in a puddle and could barely climb on the elliptical machine afterwards. When I put her to sleep we just lay on the floor, face to face, staring at each other. She smiles and I feel like I’m living in a psychedelic cartoon; the end of Yellow Submarine when the Blue Meanies have been defeated. “Beatles?” she’ll quietly ask. I exist on a plane of perfection.

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Maybe my daughter is the only drug I need. I know if either of us are down, there’s one word that brings things up. “Bubbles?” And if either of us are stressed out, we have total permission to shout, “ice cream!” and walk up to Salt & Straw for a cup of Chocolate Gooey Brownie. When it’s time to chill, “Hey Jude” always does the trick. She whispers the na-na-na-na-na-na-na part. And I’m high as a kite.

I hope you don’t mind if I bogart this kid.

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