A Good Eater

Ella B is what you might call "a good eater." This is not to say she doesn't have her moments where she will proclaim, "Don't like it," when I try to get her to eat the hummus she eats every single day, but her refusal of food is more about attitude than pickiness. In general, she will eat almost anything: salad, cheeseburgers, asparagus, miso soup, and she even speared her first tuna roll with a chopstick the other night.

She also loves the preparation of food as much as I do. Each night, she "helps" me make dinner and despite the fact that she is the worst sous chef I've ever worked with, she is still pretty awesome. I recently gave her a tutorial on removing edamame from their pods. It's adorably sad to watch her work so hard at something that seems so simple to me. She couldn't quite grasp the concept of applying pressure to one end of the pod to push the soybean out of the opening. She just kept squeezing the entire thing until it exploded in any direction across the room, and I was sent to retrieve them. Cooking with a toddler is a messy process, but something I find so rewarding, especially when Michael comes home and from her little perch on the chair against the island she tells him, "Daddy, I made you dinner!" with that little grin on her face.

I'm so thrilled to already have an adventurous eater because adults or children who won't try new foods is probably one of my biggest pet peeves of all time. I'd love to think that my children will grow up loving vegetables and ethnic foods and that we won't have to order chicken nuggets wherever we go until they are 27. I also think that teaching my children how to prepare food with love is one of the most important life skills I can give them, and I hope she will always feel that pride of accomplishment in preparing a meal when she grows up, whomever she might be cooking for. Hopefully, I'll get to sit at that table with her.