Food Woes

My RIDONCULOUSLY picky children, when it comes to eating perfectly normal things:


JULIA: (in the car on the way home from chorus) Mommy?  I'm STARVING.
ME: Okay, well I'm gonna feed you dinner at five tonight because you have swim at 6.
JULIA: But it's 4:23!
ME: Right, so you don't have to wait long.
JULIA: But I'm SOOOO hungry!
ME: Okay, well, you can wash off some blueberries when we get home and have those as a snack.
JULIA: But they're all SHRIVELED UP.
ME: I just bought them yesterday. 
JULIA: Yeah, but they're shriveled.
ME: They're brand new.  They're fresh.
JULIA: No they're not. They shrivel up in ONE DAY!

But...they really don't.  If she wants to see shriveled, I'll show her the next container of blueberries that gets pushed to the back of the fridge and I find it months later and realize I forgot all about it.


MADELEINE: (carrying up her dinner plate, empty except for one detested zucchini and one - usually beloved - pepper to the sink)
ME: Wait.  What's wrong with this pepper?  (forking the pepper to hold out to her as she scampered into her room and shut the door to hide from it)
MADELEINE: It has (inaudible) on it.
ME: It has WHAT on it?
MADELEINE: Frankenstein marks.


The kids are on to me.  I'm totally carrying out creepy food experiments by rapidly shriveling my blueberries and making our peppers into monstrous necrotic creatures.  Good thing they were too smart to be fooled into eating those horrid items.