Snack time

I learned a valuable lesson recently: just because you make it doesn't mean they'll eat it (or be fed it).

To put it simply, the snacks Cole eats twice a day at day care are not that healthy. I know I've talked about this before, and I've had to come to terms with it, but only because we bring snacks in twice a month that are NOT goldfish, pretzels, pirate booty, tortilla chips, ritz crackers, or cookies. If parents want to give these snacks to their kids at home, that's fine by me, but when my kid has to eat it too on a regular basis, that annoys me. I wish the daycare didn't have this policy of parents bringing in snacks. It turns into a vicious cycle. Parents either bring in unhealthy snacks or they don't bring enough. If they don't bring enough, the teachers have to supplement with the snacks the daycare already has (a giant box of goldfish, a giant tupperware of chips, pretzels and goldfish).

Full disclosure here: we do give Cole some processed snacks, but we do it within reason and we don't do it on a regular basis. We also supervise how much of it he eats, which we can't do when he's at day care.

My hope has always been that I'd at least get healthy snacks into Cole (when he's there) twice a month.
We bring in fresh fruit, cheese, yogurt, cucumbers, and hummus. Not all at the same time, but those are the types of snacks we bring in.

Imagine my dismay when I arrived recently to discover that the snacks we brought in for consumption THE DAY BEFORE had only partially been consumed by the next day. This was partly due to the lack of communication amongst staff (there is no full timer in the toddler room) and partly because the staff was supplementing our healthy food with leftover junk food from previous snack days.

When I got into the toddler room I found the container of cheese was still half full and a bag of goldfish was on the counter. Cole was starving on the way home and ate four pieces of cheese in his car seat. This is a frequent problem. I pick him up only a half hour after his snack, and he's almost always hungry. When we arrived at home that afternoon, he told me he had eaten pretzels for snack. I called the daycare director and expressed my concerns and she affirmed that yes our snacks were being supplemented with "crackers" (a safe catch-all word if you ask me) because "that's what toddlers want."

Well here's the reason they want it: if that's all you give them, that's all they'll want. Plain and simple. I told her that, and she offered a solution for Cole: we can bring in his snacks just for him every day he's there and then we don't have to buy snacks for everyone else twice a month.

What a revelation. If only she had allowed us to do this from the very start of his time in the toddler room.

No wonder why childhood obesity and the related health poblems are at an alltime high. We're starting unhealthy eating habits even before the age of 2.

On that happy note, I leave you with this picture of Keith and Cole on the picnic bench at recent hike at Split Rock. This is where Cole had his snack that afternoon, so I thought it was only fitting: