Monday, August 9, 2010

Brownies for Breakfast!

I know, a blog on raising healthy kids and here I am on my 2nd post talking about Brownies for Breakfast!!

Having 3 daughters, I am careful to avoid instilling those negative body image issues you hear so much about in today’s young women and I think brownies for breakfast can help me with that! Now bear in mind, I am not a certified anything and this is just my own personal experiment that I have been conducting for the past couple of years . . . for the real scientific results you will have to check back when my kids are in their 20’s and see how well adjusted they are! For now, I am going on gut instinct!

Here is what I am doing so far:
Lead by example – Check
I run, I eat granola and drink shakes for breakfast, salad for lunch, serve balanced dinner every day. Kids have health conscious parents to model.

Healthy Food First – Check
Few rules here – you must have breakfast, you have to eat all your lunch at school and not just the treat, you don’t finish dinner, you don't get dessert or vitmains. Simple and always enforced. They know the 4 food groups and know healthy food first. Always.

Family Meals – Check
We eat dinner together every single night as a family. Dad too. At the table. No TV. And we talk. Having said that, my kids are 4,6,8 and haven’t developed full on lives of their own yet so I can have Family Meals !

I also do something else important, I make eating FUN!! Broccoli is never fun when you are 6, but you have to eat it. To offset that, we have "play food" nights. Pudding for dessert, served on a tray and eaten with . . . your HANDS! They love it . . mix up a couple flavours and they are happy little kids! Jello on a tray works too . .add in the whip cream for super YUMMY Fun!

The brownies for breakfast happened by accident one day, but it’s the same idea – its Fun. My kids birthday is always a special day for them and one year we had birthday cake left over so I jokingly said, “who wants cake for breakfast” and of course they all said “ME” . . and I thought, why not? So now when it's anyones birthday, the whole family gets to have cake or brownies for breakfast.

It’s not going to hurt them, not going to decay their teeth, not going to turn them into sugar monsters. It is however, going to make that a super fun day (it started with cake!!), make them the envy of all their friends (they had cake for breakfast!) and make some amazing lifelong family memories (no one forgets cake for breakfast!) and it makes me one super cool mom (I LET them have cake, FOR BREAKFAST!).

And the best part? Since a DQ Ice Cream cake is what I order every year on my special day, I get to have ice cream for breakfast on my birthday!!

Do you let your kids get messy with food sometimes or have dessert first? How do you make food fun? Leave me a comment so I can try it out on my kids ! We love having fun!

4 comments:

  1. Great post! My kids love anything they can eat with their hands so taco night is always a big hit. Breakfast for dinner is always fun for them too. Pancakes and fruit are a favorite around here!

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  2. My husband and I always do family dinners even though it's just the two of us. I have had brownies for breakfast. It wasn't my birthday, it was what my nephew calls a "bad choice." He was right but it tasted soooooo good the one time I did it :)

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  3. Family dinners and no tv are a must in this house. Granted it is hard to gather them all so often some combination of one or two are missing but the rest of us eat and talk. Then we sit with the stragglers, watch them eat and talk some more. Our birthday ritual is ALWAYS celebrate on the day. This is mandatory thing so it may be breakfast, dinner, post bedtime but we are all here to celebrate the special day of the special kid. And the birthday kid parent must eat cake with their face. No hands aloud. Building memories will last longer than making them eat the last piece of broccoli.

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  4. With their face? Oh you are a cool mom!! Kids would love that . . not sure I'd want to do it though! My brother once asked for (and got) whip cream pies thrown in his face for his birthday. . .outside, in August, hose on hand to 'clean up'! Ah, memories!!

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