Blog Number 252

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

Continuing on with her trend of trying new recipes, the wife has tackled black bean soup and corn chowder this week.  Now, I have had both of these items in restaurants or out of a can but never out of our crockpot.  Neither of our kids are big soup fans but my wife (as my wife is very fond of pointing out) is not a short order cook (and usually follows up that sentiment with something like, "this is what we are having so eat it or go hungry").  We have made a conscious effort not to have picky eaters in our house.  So much so that if we come across something that the kids refuse to eat (say at a restaurant or over at a friends house) we will eat that item for every meal for a week.  Cole slaw was a big one the kids did not like, 6 or 7 straight dinners with coleslaw as a side dish and voila, the are ok with it now.

Anyway, neither of the kids cared for the black bean soup that we had on Sunday.  They sat at the table picking at their bowls for about 1 hour.  Finally I took the bowls from them, placed them in the refrigerator and announced that those exact same bowls would be heated up for their next meal (be it dinner or the next morning's breakfast - not an uncommon event as the daughter recently had potato soup for breakfast).  They ended up eating the rest of it later that evening albeit slowly.

Last night was corn chowder.  They were making about the same amount of progress as with the black bean soup so I asked the daughter to go to my bedroom and bring me the clock that dings (we have a kitchen timer that you can set for up to 1 hour than it will ding - they play with this a lot for some reason).  Upon hearing my request, the son started digging into the chowder (much to the confusion of the daughter).  She came back empty handed so I had to head to the back of the house to look for the timer.  During my search, the wife explained to the daughter that daddy was going to set the timer and if she did not have her chowder finished by the time it dinged, there would be consequences.  I came back and set it for 15 minutes (which is plenty of time) but since the daughter still does not grasp the concept of time that well she started shoving chowder in her mouth like she hadn't eaten in a week.  We tried to convince her that she had plenty of time and she did slow down a little.  7 minutes later, the bowls were empty.  The chowder was quite good (I had 2 bowls and it will likely be my lunch today).

The timer though might stay on our kitchen table for the time being just in case the kids need encouragement.

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts,

Jon