Cereal Addict

When I started having kids years ago I swore I would NEVER have a picky eater.  I figured this sort of taste tantrum was a simple war of wills and I was sure my will would supersede that of any small child raised in my house.

Ah, naiveté.

Enter child number 3, the pickiest eater on the planet.  This kid is capable of embarking on a most impassioned hunger strike that would impress Gandhi himself, before he will eat anything not to his liking. As far as picky eaters go he is a crafty one.  His tactic is to be as quiet as a church mouse about the whole affair-what we call civil disobedience. His modus operandi is to fly under the radar, go completely unnoticed. Therefore Connor will never complain about what is getting served up for dinner, or when anything he hates to eat gets presented before him.  He feigns interest until you're not looking and then somehow the offending food disappears. He's a master at trompe l'oeil--his specialty: faking a clean dinner plate. After which he will then quickly offer to take out the trash, unload the dishwasher, and rinse all the plates so that you forget that he was ever served a vegetable that could be hidden on his plate or person.

What does he eat?  Cereal. He can't get enough cereal. Which is strange because I HATE cereal--How is it possible that I birthed a child who could love something I hate so much? I've thought about having tests done to see if this kid could really be mine because I'm suspicious he may have been switched at birth. I would rather eat the box the cereal came in than have a bowl of milk and floating debris.  But Connor??  He would eat cereal for every meal for the rest of his life if you'd let him. I don't even buy the fancy sugary stuff either. Just plain ol' Cheerios.

Connor is also a serious carnivore.  If he's not eating cereal then he will eat meat. Or rather, chicken. To this day he will ask what were having for dinner and as long as he hears the word chicken, he will eat it.  So we just tell him everything is chicken. Beef, turkey, fish, we call it all "chicken". We insist there are a lot of varieties of chicken out there. Fishy chicken, Hamburger Chicken, Chicken steak. So far it's worked, although I think he's beginning to catch on.

Now that he's old enough to be a Boy Scout, he's been going on lots of campouts. Which means he's eating meals away from home.  For Connor, these campouts have turned into something that more closely resembles an internment camp as he usually comes home skinny and starving like a POW.  

I found this note Connor wrote about his latest campout:

The next thing that came to his head was sleep. 

After eating half a dozen bowls of cereal he headed strait to bed.  I found him asleep just a few minutes after his cereal binge; fully clothed, remote in hand, totally passed out.

The crash and burn of a cereal addict.