Everything Tastes Better With...

Ketchup, apparently.

It's such a strange thing.  Cannon is a terrific eater - the kid will eat two slices of chard tart at a sitting and pretty much anything else we offer him.  Kale jambalaya was a big hit.  Tacos.  Enchiladas.  Most meats, even if a little spicy.  Fruit is a huge favorite, and he'll eat some veggies.  But sometimes, like most kids, he's just not in the mood.  This seems particularly true when we eat out.  I have found, however, that if you dip his food in ketchup, he will gobble it up.  If he even sees the bottle on the table, all bets are off unless his food is dipped in it.  French fries?  He doesn't eat them.  He merely uses them as a ketchup delivery device.  He'll double and triple dip them, sucking the red goop off, until the fry begins to fall apart.  Then he starts all over with another one.  Just this very evening he was refusing his dinner until I broke out the sauce.  I suppose it isn't such a far cry from salsa to ketchup, but I can't get terribly excited about chicken quesadillas with ketchup.

I was a ketchup eater as a kid.  Not like this, I don't think.  But I would eat bologna and ketchup sandwiches almost every day for lunch.  I still eat it on my fries, and on most ketchup-appropriate foods.  Even so, I don't understand the attraction.  Rowan is also a fan, though like me he pretty much limits it to burgers, hot dogs, and fries.  Kemper won't touch it with a ten foot pole.  If there is one speck of red on his food (if, for example, he wants the last few bites that Rowan didn't eat), he won't eat it at all.  Even if you remove the offending morsel.  Once contaminated, always contaminated, I guess.

We All Scream...

Recently we went on a weekend trip to Maine.  The drive took us about 3 hours or so, and was actually pretty painless.  We've discovered that Rowan and Kemper are old enough to really listen to a book on tape, and this was our second trip trying that out.  It works really well.

Anyway, as we got relatively close to our destination, there was a Dairy Queen.  Of course we stopped.  I went in with the boys to order, while Morgan waited with the sleeping baby in the car.  It took forever to make our ice cream; not sure why, but seriously we waited about 20 minutes for 2 chocolate dipped cones and 2 blizzards.  Whatever.

So we load back into the car to continue our trip.  Now normally I wouldn't let the kids eat ice cream in the car. I'm conflicted about allowing any food in the car, but usually give in and let them eat.  But the baby was sleeping, there weren't any tables anyway, and we wanted to get there, so exceptions were made.  It was a beautiful day, and we were on a local road, so Morgan put the windows down.  This generally results in complaints from the back seat - Rowan doesn't like the wind blowing so much (as a toddler he'd say, "NO WINDY!!!" when it was too cold outside for him).  But there was ice cream so it was pretty quiet.

For about 5 minutes.  Then there was a sudden cry from the back seat:  "The ice cream is all over me!"  Sure enough, once we pulled over to assess the damage, we saw ice cream everywhere.  It looked like someone had turned on a high-speed fan and held the ice cream cones in front of it.  The wind dug little eddies out of the chocolate coating, then forced the rapidly melting ice cream out of the holes.  It took me a full 15 minutes to get it clean.  And the boys stood on the side of the road to finish the cones while I cleaned the mess.

It sort of reminded me of the time when I was a kid riding in the backseat of a friend's car.  The windows were down, and her dad spit out the window and it came in through the back window and hit me in the face.  I'm guessing it isn't quite so gross when it's ice cream, though.