I have a dream

I had a dream. A dream that I would have a child who would be a healthy eater.

The dream began well. As a small child she took to solids with gusto with her first food being avocado. She was chomping on steamed veges early and apart from an allergy to organge coloured vegies and avoiding carrots, pumpkin and sweet potato - which she grew out of - we were going great guns.

We limited sugar exposure and kept her away from processed foods and chocolate where possible.

Then we started travelling. Again we were keeping the dream alive. Until we went to Spain.

Spain - not only the land of Gaudi, the Camino, tapas and Sangria. Spain - the land of Spanish grandmas who love nothing more than to ply cute children up to the eye ball with sugary treats. Everywhere we went sugar was included -even the bread was sweet.

Spain - a dentists paradise.

From that point on we saw our daughter develop a sweet tooth irrespective of how hard we tried to limit the sugary treats.

Fast forward through the hideous 'white stage' which we hear is common - white, plain pasta, white milk, white rice and white meat - as plain as possible. While we internally shuddered - white bread gets the huge thumbs down in our house -  Raya seemed to exist some days on bread and water alone while still managing to outgrow all her clothes.

Till we reach the present day where our 3 year old child seems almost allergic to healthy fruit and vegetables. In the battle for healthy eating it is child 1 vs parents 0.

Prior to children I believed that children only eat what you give them - which is true, to a point. See my daughter can move a chair and reach tall cupboards and can also undo tin cans with a ring pull, open bottles in the fridge and work her way through packets of rice cakes while I am in the shower if she is feely particularly speedy.

We have done the talk about 'soemtimes foods' and 'always foods' except she feels the always heading belongs on the sometimes foods. She has a serious carbohydrate addiction!

And what I didn't realise in my naively blissful, opinion forming, pre child existence is how damn persistent they can be. A preschooler can whinge down or stubbornly out last even a determined resolve. They can also use their weak spot radar and when identified push that button to their full advantage. Mine is the car trip. The screaming and whinging is enough to make me drive my car straight off the road in the National Park straight into a tree!!!

So inspired by recent articles on 'slow food' and Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution (still seriously uninspired by his so called 30 minute meals - yeah right - the layout of the recipes takes 30 mins alone) we decided to reclaim our parental dream.

We have a dream that our daughter will eat fruit and vegetables and in pursuit of that dream we planted a vegetable garden.

Okay now just on the off chance that  my hubby reads this blog post - we shared the dream and then he implemented it while I stood as site supervisor.

So here is what we began with

We are renting our current property. This is to the side of one of the terrace levels in our steep front yard. We believe it was the site for an old house at one point. It has stone foundations the entire way around which means that our vegetables should be sheltered while growing. Digging this baby up was no fun (for Nick lol). It was like an archeological dig as we discovered what 18 years worth of tenants had been throwing in there. Some of the things we found were glass window panes and a huge amount of baby sized coat hangers. Weird ?

But at the end of the first stage it looked like this

We cleared all the rubbish and bought a HUGE composting bin. After this photo we went to Bunnings and a gnome, I mean woman, helped us out with sugar cane mulch, soil, manure etc basically all the stuff we need to prep our little patch. So we prepped and waited for 2 weeks till we could plant. We kept the middle as a garden path for us to walk along.

Finally we were ready to plant our vegetables and I will be back with the Vege Patch Part 2 to share how that went!

Still believing in our dream for a vege eating child