Taste Buds of the Tiny and Semi-Toothless

My children are good eaters. They're actually pretty amazing eaters, especially compared to the horror stories you hear about kids who will only eat cherry jello and saltines. There are very few foods the will not eat and/or try. Abby asks for mustard to dip her hotdogs in and Anni pretty much wants to eat whatever is on anyone's plate. The problem is, as good as eaters as they are, they tend not to be good eaters when I actually want them to be. Like at dinnertime.

Tonight Anni was a killer eater at dinner. And after a rather fussy afternoon, it was a welcome relief. I had dinner ready for her when I got the girls up from their afternoon nap and she just chowed down. Abby, however, was completely uninterested in food, dinner or otherwise, so Anni just helped herself right along to Abby's plate.

Later, Abby discovered a pot of sauce on the stove. Now, I do make a pretty good red sauce if I do say so myself (thanks to Sara's mom), but red sauce does not a dinner make. Unless, of course, your mother is desperate to get some form of food substance into your tummy before you go to bed for the next 12 hours and gives in to a request for sauce. Dinner, for Miss Abigail, thus consisted of 2 bowls (yes, bowls people) of red sauce and a phenomenon known as "dirty milk." Dirty milk is a trick we learned from our friend Riley. She likes chocolate milk but since she was much smaller and had a few less words and/or signs, has called it dirty milk. Abby loves it when she gets to have dirty milk at Riley's house, so she was very excited to learn that mom can make dirty milk too. At Riley's house, they mix 1% white milk with the skim chocolate milk. At our house, on a night when the little miss refuses to eat anything other than bowls of red sauce, dirty milk consists of 3/4 heavy whipping cream and a splash of chocolate skim milk. People, I fear for the morning diaper...