Devil Mommy

(or bribing my kid into eating the right stuff)

Yeah, that’s me. And no, it’s not what I’m going to be for Halloween (though after this episode maybe I should).

So, yesterday, I went shopping. I had to get Nia a light jacket. When we lived in Florida, we didn’t need many jackets, so Nia had only two - a jean jacket and a parka that I got for a quarter last year at a yard sale because we were going to Chicago for Christmas. It’s not quite cold enough for the parka yet here in the D. C. area, so the jean jacket would have been perfect, if it weren’t for the fact that I sent her to school wearing it a couple of weeks ago and we never saw it again, even though I had labeled it with her name. I asked the teacher for help, checked “lost and found” several times but no luck. The jacket vanished, so I had to go get a replacement. I ended up finding two nice ones and they were both on sale, so I got both, just in case.

When Nia came home from school in the afternoon, she fell in love with one of them. It’s a cozy fleece hooded little thing with multicolored stripes. She liked it so much, she wanted to wear it the very next day.

In the meantime, I was making chicken pot pie for dinner. I put lots of vegetables in it and really wanted her to have it because she had been having constipation issues of late. Too much info, I know, but stay with me.

She wanted to eat corn dogs instead. So, I cut her a deal: if she ate chicken pot pie for dinner, she could wear the new fleece jacket to school the next day. She didn’t like that at tall and ended up throwing a mega tantrum complete with crocodile tears. I was not moved by her tears, so she said, “Why do you force me to do things I don’t want to do?”

I somehow managed to stay calm (which is usually not the case) and just said, “Because chicken pot pie is better for you than corn dogs.”

She gave me a big huffy breath and marched off into her room only to appear five minutes later with a couple of pictures she had hastily drawn to illustrate her feelings:

Exhibit 1: The creature with the sword and the horns labeled Devl (Devil) Mommy, is me (I did like how skinny I was and yes, spelling is not her forte, yet). She later explained that I had her pinned to the wall. Notice her sad face and the emphatic “No!!!!!!!!!”

Then she proceeded to show me Exhibit 2, representing how she wanted to feel. She wanted to wear her jaky (jacket) and feel happy and eat whatever she wanted.

I stood firm and she eventually relented and ate her chicken pot pie. Here she is today, wearing her new jacket and happy, just like in her drawing…

Oooohhhh, the things we Moms have to endure to get our kids to eat right...