I was reading a hilarious and accurate blog post on children and mealtimes earlier that really sums up the sort of chaos that reigns here when I’m serving a meal. I keep vowing to have us all eat together as a family instead of eating with my husband after the children are in bed but there are two major issues with that plan: under 6 year olds like to eat very boring food, very early in the evening. Actually I should rephrase that: our children like to eat very boring food very early in the evening. You probably have children who eat exotic foods late in the evening, preferably with a little smooth jazz in the background (we prefer the Frozen soundtrack around here, pretty pretty sophisticated taste)
Anyway what I wanted to talk about was the latest in a long litany of ridiculous supper time demands that I try to fulfil in order to ensure that they actually eat something of some nutritional value and not just plain pasta and cheerios.
This recent addition to the complexity of suppertime is the requirement that the colour of their plates and cups matches the colour of their respective Tripp Trapps. My own stupid Pinterest/Houzz fault as I saw pictures like this – and thought how delightful it would be to have multiple coloured chairs for the children..
(Actually I have just clicked on the site and their whole house is worth a peek)
But anyway, if I had just stuck to plain white chairs this wouldn’t be my life, scrabbling around to find the last green cup so that my 2 year old is satisfied with the matching.
Why me? I thought, as I commented on the original dinner time blog. Why do my children feel so desperate to have a certain colour plate?! Then it occurred to me! I have spent some time lately working on colours with our 2 year old, who was a little confused about the colour names (with a 4 year old sister in the house, our 2 year old thinks that ‘pink’ is actually just the same word as ‘excellent’, as in, if you gave her the wrong type of biscuit she would say “no!! The pink one!!” Until you gave her the right kind of biscuit (chocolate, not pink at all). So no wonder this focus on colours has transferred to all arenas – food included.
Anyway one of our favourite colour matching activities in this house (this house of boring food and excellent activities!) is using these colour dinosaurs I bought from amazon when my son was 2 and very keen on dinosaurs. They are played with a lot in this house so I would wholeheartedly recommend them if you are stuck for a gift that your 2 or 3 year old recipient will love and their parents will not want to shove under the stairs. So you set up a few coloured bowls in the house and leave them, with a pile of the dinosaurs and a pair of big tweezers, for your children to find and sort into coloured piles. Even my 4 year old still finds this quite absorbing.
Don’t blame me if it ruins your jazz filled sophisticated suppertime though.
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