My ten year old daughter has always battled me at mealtime. She was born 10 weeks early and was fed through a tube for two weeks before I begged the doctors to let us try bottle feeding her. I have a home video of that first bottle and halfway through you can hear the monitor sound an alarm to let us know her heart rate was dropping dangerously low. Things have only gone downhill from there.

If she was permitted to exist on popcorn, chicken nuggets and Ho Hos there would be no problem at all. The girl is totally doomed when she gets to college. Let's hope she continues to play three sports.

When she was a toddler she would pick at her plate and it would take her an hour-and-a-half to eat a meal. People thought I was kidding until they saw it for themselves.

After Thanksgiving one year, we even received a note from a dear great-aunt who told us how impressed she was with the way our daughter sat at her seat and ate her food, while her cousins left the table and played all around her. For an hour. We didn't have the heart to tell her that it was only because there was turkey and, for crying out loud, she has to chew turkey 136 times before she would swallow a bite. At least it made us look like good parents. For once.

She was so picky in kindergarten, that she would come home with one quarter of her sandwich eaten, and nothing else. I could hear her stomach growling from three blocks away.

Now that she's been around for over a decade, I have learned to work with it.

Tonight I made salmon, which is one of her favorite things to eat. As we always do, we went over our best and worst parts of our day.

And darn if I don't have to work a little harder, because when I asked my daughter to tell us the worst part of her day, she didn't hesitate in saying, "That this salmon has no flavor."

Labels: Family Life, Kids, Prematurity, Shameless Statements