Bugs and Clichés

I grew up eating everything just about everything that was placed in front of me—liver, fish with eyes still intact, frog’s legs--you name it. I am determined to raise a child that semi-follows in my footstep. I don't expect her to eat the same stuff I did when I was a kid, since you have to work pretty hard to find fish with head/eyes intact in the States. But I do expect her to try everything that K and I eat, so we have a motto in our household: try everything just once, and remember the starving children out there.

On the latter point, I find myself constantly telling EB that she’s lucky to have such abundance of food available to her--there are starving children in Africa and Asia that would give anything to have what she has (clichéd, I know). “Sometimes, these starving kids have to eat bugs to get enough nutrition,” I would tell her. To which, her eyes would always widen, and she would take the obligatory bite of the food that she was protesting earlier on. She definitely took this to heart, as you’ll see in the dialogue that we had last night.

EB: “Why do kids have to go to school?”

Me: “So you can learn lots of things.”

EB: “Why do we need to learn lots of things?”

Me: “So you can become smart and get a job. You know what happens if you don’t get a job?”

EB: “You can’t make any money.”

Me: “That’s right. And what happens if you can’t make any money?”

EB: “Then that means you can’t buy food. And it means that you have to eat bugs, LOTS OF BUGS, ALL NIGHT LONG.”



This wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, but at least now I know that my lectures to her isn’t in one ear and out the other.