Kids

Let's face it: rainy summer days can really suck if you don't have a magic trick up your sleeve to distract your kids! With this in mind, and knowing I'd need a little extra something to get me through a summer with the two older boys and a baby, I bought an awesome set of activity cards through #1's classroom Scholastic order.

Today was the 24th Ottawa Beavers' Lemonade sale, to raise money for their camping trip next month. I and another leader each made up a 20 litre batch of our "secret recipe", and we headed off to the bike path near the river, where we knew there would be lots of traffic. This is the same place where we took the Beavers fishing a month or so ago, and the same place where I take the boys fishing a few times a week. In hindsight the bike path traffic was not as great as we'd anticipated, because as it turns out the path splits in two about 500 meters on one side of where we were, and joins back up about 500 meters on the other side, and most of the through traffic takes the other branch. But we still raised 90 bucks for our camping trip, and next time around we'll choose our location a bit more carefully and I bet we'll easily double that!

The kids had a really great time - we were there for just shy of two hours, and of course 5, 6 and 7 year old boys being what they are, they spent at least as much time chasing the geese and throwing rocks in the river, as they did peddling lemonade. Incidentally, here is the recipe I use.

• 4 x 1L can apple juice
• 2.5 cups lemon juice (or lemon/lime mixed if you like)
• fill to 20 litres with water

We originally started making sugar free lemonade a few years ago because friends of ours have a daughter who is hypoglycemic, so we would always make stuff that she could drink too since she cannot have drinks with sugar. But we liked it so much we kept making it that way. The other leader made a more traditional recipe which he got from his mom - made with sugar and lots of real lemons. Both of them were really great.

With the huge problem of childhood obesity which is brought into the spotlight by one of my food heroes Jamie Oliver, in his new TV show, it gets me upset when I hear the excuses that people give for not eating properly, and more importantly, for not educating their kids on proper nutrition. In one of the famous scenes you can pick up on Youtube, Jamie is in a classroom with kids, and has a table full of fresh vegetables and is quizzing the kids on what they are. The answers he gets are astonishing and shocking, even when we accept that they were probably edited for maximum shock appeal. The kids in this classroom did not seem to have much of any idea what any vegetable was, which means they'd probably never seen them not only on their own dinner plates, but on their parents', either. I do not recall whether it was in the video linked just now, or in another interview I saw with Jamie where he mentioned that this particular problem was solved with, if I recall correctly, two 1-hour educational sessions with the kids. Two 1-hour sessions! Shocking! There is no excuse for this.

Just last night in our house was one of those circumstances when we were pressed for time and were unable to cook a proper supper. I'd had a museum sleepover the night before with the boys and Beavers, and my wife has been sick the last few days. We'd just picked up a bunk bed at Ikea and had the boys' room torn apart to make room for it and get it all together before bedtime. It was already clear that the boys would miss their bedtime, we were all very hungry, and so we called in the Chef. Yes, that is right, the Chef, as in Chef-Boy-Ardee®. As full-to-the-brim as our pantry is with natural and whole foods, many of them organic or local, we do keep a very small number of "sin-foods" on hand, and as crappy as a can of Ravioli really is, we did not mind one bit feeding it to our son. Why is that?

I just convinced my 7 year old to eat some par-cooked (blanched) carrots, and it struck a note with me that we've used a number of techniques over the years to get our boys to try new foods. In this case my wife had purposely only par-cooked the carrots so they would have a crunchiness to them still - our oldest loves raw carrots but will not eat them cooked. This was a perfect "gateway technique" to get him eating cooked carrots too. It took a while to convince him to try the first carrot, but once he did, he was fine and ate it all.

Perhaps one of the most unscrupulous "gateways" we've introduced were the notorious "supper timbits". I had gotten an idea that since the boys (about 3 and 5 at the time) loved Tim Horton Timbits so much, that we should deep fry our falafel instead of making burgers, and tell the boys they were "supper timbits". It worked like a charm and now we basically can introduce any food by using the "gateway" of deep frying it into a ball the first time we feed it to them. Sure, deep fried foods are terrible if they eat them every day, but much as we love ours, it is still limited to 2 or 3 times a month so this is just fine for growing boys who are otherwise active (which many their age are not these days)