Snacks

Julia has been all about the snacks lately, even more so than usual. She typically gets a morning snack and an afternoon snack in addition to her three regular meals; however, lately, it's more like two or three morning and afternoon snacks in between meals (reminds me of "elevenses" in Lord Of the Rings.) This is not because I'm providing the snacks for her, mind you, but because she has figured out how to connive others into giving her extra food. Her preschool teachers have told me on multiple occasions that she complains all morning of being hungry, so they wind up giving her crackers throughout the morning instead of making her wait until official snack-time. And when I take her along with me to teach my piano lessons, she eats snack at every house we go to, despite the fact that I always feed her something beforehand (because, honestly, these clients are paying me to teach their children and I don't really feel right expecting them to feed mine.) The problem with all this snacking, if you haven't guessed already, is that she subsequently isn't finishing her meals because she's too full from all the crackers, goldfish, and cookies. (Even her preschool teachers acknowledge that despite her complaints of hunger all morning, she's hardly eating any of her lunch at lunch bunch.) Ethan and I are pretty weary of the dinner time prodding and the fact that it takes Julia nearly an hour to eat her meal because she's procrastinating or resisting eating her veggies, so I decided we need to curb some of this afternoon snacking a bit and bring her to the table for dinner with an appetite. So I have been telling her, as we leave for piano lessons, that she already had snack and I don't want her asking for more at the various houses (I had been constantly overhearing her say to my clients, "I'm hungry," or, "Can I have some snack?") She has been good about not asking since I brought that up; however, she's stuck in a bit of a pickle when the moms, now so used to feeding her, offer her snack. So I modified my rule and told her that if a mommy offers her snack and she's really feeling hungry, it's okay to accept, but that she's not to ask for it, and if she's not truly hungry, she should say "no, thank you." The problem with this concept, however, is that what Julia really zeroes in on is the offer of a snack; as soon as said offer is made, she then uses it as an opportunity to ask for a snack of her choosing (as in: "Would you like a cookie, Julia?" "No, I want some of those little bunny crackers." "We're all out of those. How about a cookie?" "Um, I think I want some goldfish.") And lately when we're leaving the house for piano lessons and I remind her that she has already eaten and shouldn't be asking for snack at the houses we go to, she proclaims, "Yeah, but if the mommies offer me some, that's okay." Yesterday I was particularly adamant about the "you don't need more snack" thing because we were on our way to a house at which, the previous week, Julia had eaten a cinnamon bun, then asked for goldfish, which the client was out of, had been given a snack-size bag of Smartfood instead, had eaten half the bag by the time the lesson was over, and then thrown a fit in the car when I told her we were going to save the other half of the bag for another day. Luckily, my student's mother was on the phone for much of yesterday's lesson so Julia played quietly and happily with toy cars without fussing about being hungry. However, about 10 minutes before the end of the lesson, she must have gotten worried that she hadn't yet been provided with any food, because I heard her ask from the other room, "Mrs. Mitchell? Would you like to offer me anything?" While I applaud her for finding a creative way to work outside of the box in order to get what she wanted, I am a little dismayed that my 3-year-old has already found a way to outsmart her mother and came out of the whole situation with cookie in hand without having directly uttered the taboo words. I can only imagine what the teenage years are going to be like. This child is going to be one tough cookie. Pun intended.