They'll just eat it!

I shared recently that I like to have my kids try different types of food. The next new thing could end up being their all-time favorite. (Note to self: try to stick to healthy and, more importantly, inexpensive items.) That's how caviar found its way into my shopping cart. My dad had a different theory about sharing new items with children.

"They'll just eat it." (Don't waste it on them.)

That confused me as a kid--made me wonder what HE was going to do with it. What else can you do with food??? (That's rhetorical, please don't answer.) When I got older, I realized he meant kids won't properly appreciate something "special".

In keeping with his theory, he often hid things to keep us from "just eating" them. And of course we knew all of his hiding places. Most of it was good stuff, nothing extravagant. But there was a weird psychology at work.

He liked something called horehound candy and hid it whenever he bought it. It was nasty. We knew it was nasty. But still we tried to sneak some on occasion. I remember making a face as I ate it, but still I ate it. Looking back, I'm not sure if that was because something was better than nothing or if it was simply that whatever he hid became desirable?

What do you think???

I don't like mentioning a blogger two posts in a row (it feels weird), but Tania's comment on my last post sparked the memory about my dad's theory. She wrote that if I paid $80 for caviar, the kids should pretend they LOVED it. LOL!


PS - Horehound candy is still available for sale--I think it's considered a cough drop. If you like it, well, everyone is different. I still don't like it. A friend gave me a bag last year as a joke. I decided to try it to see if my tastes had changed. I spit it out. Yuk!