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Friday, July 17, 2009

Zombie Defense Plan

I'm beginning to worry that I may be warping Isaiah a bit too much.

Tonight Jill made chicken pot pie for supper and she decided we were going to try to get Isaiah to eat it. That can be something of a challenge at times, because if he decides he doesn't want to try something, there's very little you can do to persuade him otherwise. But we were going to try to do it anyway, so Jill gave him a slice but also gave him grapes and Texas toast (both things we know he'll eat) just in case.

And sure enough, Isaiah wouldn't even look at the pie. He kept cramming his face with toast. So Jill scooped up a carrot.

"You like carrots, right? This is just a piece of carrot!"

Well, Isaiah does like carrots and so he tried the little piece. He got his "I'm not sure about this" face so we resorted to our usual playacting. "Yum! Isn't that good?"

It worked. He was willing to eat more carrots so long as it was only carrots.

But then a piece of corn got stuck to a carrot and Isaiah insisted that it be removed. Rather than do so, I opened my big mouth.

"That's just corn. You know, like what gets thrown at the zombies?"

Some of you may be raising eyebrows right now. About a month and a half ago, I purchased the game "Plants vs. Zombies" and Isaiah has watched me play it. One of the plants you use to stem a zombie invasion of your house is a "kernelpult" that tosses tiny kernels of corn and pats of butter at the zombies. Isaiah knows this offensive plant. He always points it out when I plant one. So I figured making that connection would be helpful.

It actually worked. He devoured that bite and was willing to eat more corn.

So I decided to press my luck. "You need to keep eating your veggies so you can be big and strong and fight off the zombies."

Do you see how this might not end well for us?

Actually, it wasn't so bad. At one point, Isaiah was worried that the zombies were coming. Not scared really. He just stopped and said, "If you don't eat this, the zombies will come." We assured him that Daddy had eaten his pie and that he could fight off the zombies with Isaiah.

Then Isaiah said, "If you eat your toast, the zombies will get a truck." I have no explanation for that.

So I guess Isaiah is our zombie defense plan because he did eat all of his chicken pot pie and we celebrated that the zombies were not coming.

The things you do when you're a parent. No, scratch that. The things you do when you're a weird parent.

2 comments:

Carrie said...

AWESOME!!

We've done the same thing with Piper - she doesn't like to try new things, so we name them to make her want to try - for example, Baked Spaghetti - became "Princess Spaghetti" and my daughter refuses to eat mushrooms - but doesn't have any problem eating the "jewels" in the spaghetti! :)

Lisa Lickel said...

Na - kids are a hoot. My once-four-year-old knew all the words to the prologue of Kirk's ST, that when Picard said his for TNG, Kyle turns to me and freaks me out: "Mom, it's supposed to be 'where no man has gone before.'" You just can't warp them enough. Unless you let them talk like Cookie Monster too much. 'Nother story.