Thank god for dairy cows

If it wasn't for dairy products, my 2-year-old would waste away to nothing.

I recently switched him back to whole milk and whole milk yogurt since he's lost a couple pounds since September.  Since he refuses to eat any vegetable and most fruits, I have resorted to V8 Fusion and yogurt- and chocolate-covered raisins, which are the bastard step-children of really healthy stuff, but I gotta do something.  He had been on Juice-Plus, but now he refuses that.  Sometimes I am able to mix some of the granular Juice-Plus (from a capsule) into his yogurt, but that is about as good as it gets.

He gets a multi-vitamin every day, and I've been on the lookout for sorta healthy foods that he might eat.  Or, hell, to be honest, any food that might put some meat on his bones.

Anyhoo, all this focus on G's diet got me thinking about how obsessed I am, and a lot of parents are, with getting our kids to eat healthy.  I certainly would rather be this way than buying junk food and not giving a darn what my kids eat, but I think I lose perspective in my quest to get my kids to eat an optimal diet.

For example, it is a recent phenomenon for people to be able to get fresh fruits and vegetables year-round.  Humanity has survived a long time on people eating very basic staples....not the vast variety of brightly-hued produce that will allow us all to live to be 100.

N and I have been reading a Unicef book about kids from around the world that our neighbor gave her.  Seeing how children in other countries dress, eat and live really makes me think about the goofy things I allow myself to stew over.  Like my kids eating 5 fruits/veggies a day.  People in other parts of the world eat the same bowl of rice and beans day-in and day-out and survive.

And that is the basic tenet of parenthood since the dawn of man.  Get the kids to survive.

Like his father and uncle, who barely eat any fruits/vegetables, G will probably be fairly healthy and grow to somewhere between 6'2" and 6'4".  On dairy products.  And air.