Why I *try* to serve veggies at every meal!
Weather it’s spinach in a shake or eggs, carrots at lunch or corn at dinner, I try to always include veggies at every meal! My reason might be a little different than the one you are expecting!
While eating veggies is very important for the health of our growing little ones, that’s not my biggest reason for trying to have veggies at every meal. I have done a lot of thinking about how my kids eat. There is a lot I cannot control. When they are at friend’s houses, when they are at school or someday when they move out, they decide how and what they eat. And there a lot of reasons for me to feel like I don’t want to try to get them to eat veggies. It’s hard at times to get them to eat veggies! I don’t know what kind of instinct goes against eating things that are good for us but, I kid you not, my first child at 3 years old declared he would not “eat green things!” I was astonished because he led a very sheltered life with me at home and I had no idea where he got the idea!
It’s not only hard to get kids to eat veggies at times, I also feel like I want them to have fond memories of delicious things they have eaten as kids. Wouldn’t it be more fun to just have dessert all the time?! There would never be any disagreement about that, only big smiles, haha. But that is one extreme, when on a daily basis, I feel like it would be easier just to have a meal of mashed potatoes and a roast. Or for lunch, creamy mac and cheese. My point is, it’s easy to get into a mode where serving veggies is a hard heave up a hill. So, the reason I do it? I do it because I want vegtables to become a normal part of their lives!
I don’t want my kids to grow up and have to force themselves into eating vegetables only because they have to when their health has declined. To me, it’s a lifestyle that I don’t want them to struggle with later on in life. And I guess I got into that mindset because as a child, I ate anything I wanted and nothing I didn’t, not ever worrying about the effects on my body. Later on, when health problems started to creep in, I realized that I couldn’t eat anything I wanted! It was hard! I don’t want that for them. So, vegetables have become normal for us. It hasn’t been easy and I don’t make a huge deal about it! I just add veggies into as many meals as possible. I have a post about how to help picky eaters, because all of my kids will eat vegetables pretty easily, I have one very picky eater that I have been working with for YEARS! It’s a work in progress :). I hope my journey can help you along with yours.