My Five-Year-Old Teenager

Anyone who knows Tori knows that the child can be a bit dramatic. A few weeks ago I decided to make a new dish for dinner. It was a beautiful salad topped with roasted pork and a bunch of veggies with a homemade vinaigrette. I worked for a long time on it and presented it on a pretty platter with all the various veggies in rows on top and topped with the pork and drizzled it with dressing. Long story short: I put a lot of work into it to try to do something new and fun.

So I call everyone to dinner, and Tori takes one look at it and says, "I don't like this." Now, our rule in our family is that you have to try everything. You don't have to clean your plate, but you have to try at least one bite of everything, and if you choose not to eat what there is, you don't get anything else. In other words, no trading out the salad for Captain Crunch.

So I told Tori that this was something new, that it was yummy, and that it was what was for dinner. I told her she had to try one bite of everything, and went about eating my own dinner (which was delicious, by the way!). She proceeded to push the food around on her plate, refused to try any of it, and made some sort of negative comment about how she didn't like the dinner, which she refused to even try, about every five seconds. I finally got tired of hearing it, so I explained to her that I had worked hard to make dinner and that it was not nice to say bad things about it. For this I was awarded about a 30 second break before the next "I don't like this food."

Todd does not like to see our kids treat me with disrespect, and I love him for it! He finally told Tori that if she made one more negative remark that she was going to go to bed with no dinner. We have never done this with her before, so we were both foolishly hopeful that the threat would work. The only thing it did was change the negative remarks to grunting noises muttered under her breath. I told her that those noises also were rude and that they counted as negative remarks.

At this point, she put her fork down, looked straight at me and said, very articulately, "I...don't...like...this." Well, that didn't go over so well with Todd, and he told her that she was excused and could go get ready for bed. As she walked away, she looked back over her shoulder and told us, rather smugly, "That's what I wanted anyway."

Todd and I looked at each other in stunned silence for a minute before I asked him, "Shouldn't we have another 10 years or so before she acts like that??!!" So we have agreed that we have our very own five-year-old teenager! :)