Try it, you'll like it.

“You have to try it before you say you don't like it!” The warning was delivered rather sternly, and I have to admit there was a definite undertone of disappointment.

I'm sure many parents have issued that warning around the dinner table or out at a restaurant. There is an age range that is naturally hesitant to experiment with new foods and flavors. And while we know that if they will only try the flavor, they will be surprised at how much they like it. It's just getting them over that initial hump.

My son has been a picky eat for as long as I've known him, which I guess would be his whole life. I don't know how many meals have started and begun and had that phrase thrown in many times. It's usually seasoned with additions like, you liked it when we had it last week. Or, it's just like something else he likes. You'd think after 7 years, I'd have learned, but hope springs eternal in the blonde. (Or maybe it's parental senility.)

My daughter, on the other hand, will try anything once. Twice if enough people run away in disgust.

Back when we lived in Virginia, my son and I had two dining traditions. Every Friday we had lunch at Wendy's. Before he had teeth, we bonded while he gummed broken up french fries. With teeth, we graduated to chicken strips. (He didn't like the coating, so I peeled the fried layer off while he stole my french fries. He also flirted with the old ladies that came in. Every now and then I'd look up to see how many of my fries he'd stolen. When I glanced up, a silver-haired lady across the room was waving and called out, “Did you teach him that?” I looked at the fruit of my loins and wondered just what he'd done. After all, many was the night we'd both have a bottle while watching South Park. He met my concerned look with a smile and innocent eyes. My confused look in answer to her question prompted her to explain, “He's been making eyes at me since he sat down.” Yes, he's a chip off the old block. He's even found the elusive reset button on a girl. At a street fair, he was dancing with a girl a few years older than him. She apparently finished dancing before him. Whatever distracted her, she stopped and turned around. My son, either brave or foolish, used both index fingers and poked her in the sides. While all the men in our group winced at the expected slap, his target turned around and started dancing again.)

The other tradition was Mac and Cheese, koolade and a pickle. There was something about that on a hard weekend that was perfect. We'd sit at the kitchen table, each with our bowl and plan our adventures for the rest of the day,

This past weekend, I figured that pickles might be a little too tame for my daughter, but they were within easy reach when she wanted lunch. She gave me a doubtful look when she saw the dill pickle next to her strawberry sandwich. “You have to try it before you say you don't like it.” Five minutes later she stood before me with her empty plate. “More.”

I reached for the bread and heard, “No! More Pickle!” My raised eyebrow drew forth a reluctant, “Please.”

After the third pickle, I told her she needed to wait a little bit, to make sure her stomach was ok. (Truth is, I didn't want her to eat all my pickles. While I love my children quite a bit, there are limits.)

A few hours later, I was splitting the tree that had fallen over in our driveway when I heard an evil, triumphant laugh. My daughter was standing on the porch, a pickle in each fist. “Mommy gave me pickles!”

So, my son likes pickles and so does my daughter. You're probably wondering, so, what did they have to try? Strawberry jelly and pickles pretty much pushes any envelope.

Cheese fondue. In fact, to hear my daughter tell it, cheese fondue and dill pickles is probably the best combination ever made. In fact, it was so good, that she wanted to add the pickles to the pot. My wife's growl gave her a little pause.

“But Mommy, it's good. Try it.”

“I don't want to try it.”

“You should try it.” My daughter even put a pickle on her plate.

“No.”

“You have to try it before you say you don't like it!”

When your kids use your own logic on you, it can be funny. When they use your own logic and they are right, it is annoying. (My daughter, ever the optimist, is sure my wife will be out of the “never try a new food” phase soon.)

Salt-Covered Windshields

Well, we’ve survived two weeks of the new work schedule, so I thought I’d give an update to those comparing the changes to my family and the First Family. (Both families started new jobs about the same time, we both got new dogs and both have two kids that are going through this also.)

I don’t know about President Obama, but this week, I found that I could lie to my kids and not feel guilty. This happened on Thursday. I had to be at work by 9 a.m. to conduct a training class with people from the U.S. and London. The class had been planned for over a week, so I’d gone over pretty much every scenario and figured I could manage getting the kids up, fed, dressed and to school and still make it in on time. (For those detailed oriented people, with my daughter, the order is very important. If she eats before she is dressed, she needs at least another shirt, sometimes pants and socks have to be changed too.) (This is the same girl that thinks strawberries and yellow mustard is a “delicious” combination. She also turns from a platinum blonde to a redhead when she eats spaghetti.)

I took a few minutes Wednesday night with my son, explaining that we had to leave early in the morning and if he could help me, he’d earn more points. (I know, that’s bribery, but keep in mind the starting theme of this article. Just think of it as me starting him out early on a career as a politician.) Well, Thursday morning came and I still maintain that there is nothing positive about 6 a.m. We’ve gotten our routine down and we were all ready and in the car by 6:45, an hour ahead of our normal schedule. My son was doing his best for extra points.

When we got in the car, it was still dark. My daughter’s little voice whispered, “I scared.”

My son, still in his helpful mode, (I can see why lobbyist like their jobs.) explained, “She’s scared cause it’s dark.”

“It’s not that dark,” I grumbled and tried to back up the driveway. Mother Nature had decided to put my planning skills to the test and graced us with another night of snowfall. I found myself silently joining their morning chant of “Let’s crash, let’s crash, let’s crash.” (See the previous article on my children’s sadistic desire to see my car wrapped around a tree.) Unfortunately, we made it up the driveway without hitting a single tree. Halfway to preschool, my daughter broke the silence with, “I not scared anymore, daddy. It bright out.”

She was right, somewhere, the sun was rising. For the past two weeks, I’ve been getting up before the sun has risen, but sometime during getting my monsters fed and dressed, the sun had risen. This morning, it greeted us as we drove.

“Don’t you like the sun rise, daddy?” My son’s voice was far too bright and cheerful for this early. I considered explaining that daddy does not like anything until after three cups of coffee, but he was keeping his sister happy and I didn’t want to risk that. (I still had to get them out of the car, into preschool, their stuff put away and hands washed before I could make my escape.)

The Lie: “Yes, I love the sun rise. It makes me very happy.”

That led to a discussion on where the sun was. I had no idea. The sky was overcast and I was running low on clear windshield. The snow from last night had melted while the car warmed up so all the salt residue was cleaned off when we started. However, at 0 degrees, the windshield washer fluid was frozen.

While this sounds dangerous, I’ve got the routine down. After dropping the kids off, I get back on the main roads and the passing trucks kick up enough spray to keep the windshield somewhat clean. By the time I get into Pittsburgh, everything has unfrozen and I can clean the windshield.

It was just after the sunrise comment when my wife called. She’d left for work an hour earlier. Surely, she was calling to tell me traffic was fine and to take my time. Instead, she was in a backup and wanted directions on a different way into the city. After dropping the kids off, I checked and still had two hours to drive the 40 miles to work. After Washington, DC traffic, there was no way I couldn’t handle this.
Unless the backup that my wife had been in was an accident that had traffic snarled for ten miles. 20 degrees, that’s when the windshield washer pump unfreezes. I sat in the crawling traffic watching the temperature, the other cars and the time. You’ve heard of rose-colored glasses? I have a salt-covered windshield. Behind that layer of near impenetrable grime, everything slows down. I realized it didn’t matter if I was a few minutes late. You can’t control traffic any more than you can control when the temperature will get above 20.

Fire Truck

“Fire truck! Daddy, I see a fire truck!” This is what my daughter cried out on Halloween this year as we sat on the side of the road. We were taking a break from collecting loot and candy. No, there wasn’t a fire. The local volunteer fire department drives through our neighborhood (and others) every Halloween and Christmas. My son loves fire trucks and has spent hours and hours educating his sister on the subtleties of the different kinds. She knows a fire truck when she sees one and made sure everyone within earshot knew it was coming.

When my son started speaking, he had a problem with the letter L. Pillow was pronounced “Piwwow.” We weren’t concerned. (There were many times in college when I had a hard time pronouncing almost all the letters. This only tended to happen on the weekends, so I wasn’t that worried about it.) But we did work with him. We made a list of words that started and had the letter L in them. We’d carefully pronounce them. He could hear the difference, but couldn’t quite get his mouth around that one letter. When he learned his letters and started reading, he saw what the letter L looked like. That helped. Now, when we wrote the words with the L’s in them, he saw where it was in the word. Pillow went from “Piwwow” to “Pillllow.” (He was dedicated and persistent)

Now, since my son had the problems with the letter L and the TH, you might think I’d expect the same from my daughter when she started talking. But, she’s lead me down that same path many times. My son was a picky eater; my daughter ate anything that she could catch. My son was a loud sleeper; my daughter never made a peep. My son is surprisingly (considering his mother) agile and coordinated; I don’t think there’s an obstacle my daughter hasn’t first tried to go through.

So, while my wife did her thing, (reading, researching, talking to other parents and generally learning all the options) I knew my daughter would pretty much wake up one day and be completely fluent in English and probably a few other languages. This time, she was not going to fool me.

My son was on the job. Many were the times we’d be driving and I’d hear, “Now, say one.” A moment later, a little voice would chirp, “One.” They worked up to ten in no time. So, with her brother taking care of her vocabulary and counting, I knew my daughter was in good hands. In no time at all, she had one to five down. She even knew those numbers backwards. I found that one out, and also learned that with a five-year old and two and half-year old, you need to pay attention, the hard way. I made the mistake of lying on the floor one fall day to watch a football game. I was aware of the counting down, and didn’t pay it much attention until she landed on my back after what felt like a perfect double flip from the sofa. The giggling from the two of them almost drown out my cry of agony. Now, my back spasms whenever I hear either of them counting backwards from five.

What does this have to do with, “Fire truck! Daddy, I see a fire truck!”? Well, I’ll tell you. I don’t know if my son decided that my daughter didn’t really need to have TR in her list of mastered sounds, or if she decided to once again do the exact opposite of what I’d expected. While she’d mastered the important words, like “please” “more” “no” and “I don’t want to take a nap right now because I am not tired and I really know that you want me to take a nap so you can take one too.”, she couldn’t make the TR sound.

You’d be surprised how many words don’t have TR in them. This would probably explain why I didn’t know this until Halloween night. So, while we were sitting in a neighbor’s yard, my kids both dressed as Spiderman (she found her brother’s old Spiderman costume and claimed it as hers. Clifford and Elmo were both discarded as she proclaimed she was going to be Spiderman, like her brother!). Our neighbors walked by and we’d exchange hellos, the kids talking about which houses had the best candy.

When the fire truck, lights flashing, started down the road. My daughter stood and pointed and for the first time, I found out that she couldn’t pronounce TR. When a three-year old can’t say TR, you might be wondering just what does she use to replace those two letters? Well, my daughter proudly proclaimed that a “Fire f__k” was coming down the street. Somehow, I don’t think the people at Marvel Comics would have approved of her Spiderman impersonation.

Self-Editing

When does our ability to self-edit fail? I don’t mean going back through an email or re-reading the instant message before you send it to make sure you’ve gotten all the you’re, your, its and it’s correct. No, I’m talking about the time lag between when the words come to mind and they pass your lips.

Like everything from gray hair to my sore knees, I blamed my children when I noticed that my self-editor wasn’t always working at full speed. It was only logical. I’d seen my parents and my wife’s parents lose theirs. Granted, my wife was not nearly the angel and child prodigy I was, so it was only logical that her parents would lose theirs. I blame my brother for my parents losing theirs.

But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I realize that this one time, maybe my children aren’t to blame. The first time I remember noticing it was long before we had children. We still lived in Washington, DC and I was an instructor at one of the leading technical training centers there. It was also a government contracting company. (Every business in DC seems to be a government contractor.) Because we did a lot of work with the CIA and NSA and I specialized in security, many military people came through my classes.

Now, over the years, I’ve worked with a lot of Marines. I don’t think I’ve met one that didn’t impress me. The ones that came through my training were, to a man, young, intelligent and driven.

The first time I remember my self-editor not working was during a class that had two Marines in addition to other corporate clients. It was towards the end of lunch and the students were starting to return. Being a professional, I’d reloaded my coffee and played minesweeper during lunch. (I do my best work when I am overloaded on coffee and lightheaded.) (Minesweeper isn’t just a game. It’s a Tao. I’ve often used it to predict events. The first time my wife went for an important job interview, I stayed up most of the night working. The first goal was winning on the advanced level under a certain time. If I did that, the interview would go well. Then I had to win twice in a row, and she would be considered for the job. When I won three times in a row, under a certain time limit, she would get the job offer. The next day, when she came home with the job, she didn’t seem too impressed when I told her how I got her the job.)

As the students returned, one of the Marines asked a question about something we’d covered before lunch. It was a really good question and something we were going to cover that afternoon. I remember the words forming. Saw each and everyone. For. Marine. Question. Good. That’s. A. Very. A. I think my body knew something was wrong because the fight or flight response was triggered when the adrenaline kicked in.

“For a Marine, that’s a very good question.”

Now, I need to explain that there was nothing prejudice or anti-military in my response. We’d spent the past week joking and everyone in the class had a good sense of humor. In fact, when another student said, in amazement, “I didn’t know Lotus Notes did that,” about a security feature, this Marine said, “That’s because you don’t need to know.”

There were two possible responses. Since I’m still alive, he obviously didn’t take the first. He laughed and we spent the afternoon working on his question.

So, I can’t blame my kids for my self-editing feature not working. Now that I think about it, they’ve helped strengthen it. Rather than use the first four-letter word that immediately springs to mind when I see my daughter unscrew her sippy-cup and pour the contents on the carpet I just finished cleaning, my brain catches them and substitutes a string of incoherent sounds.

I know I am more aware of the words, especially when my son started the nightly Daddy, what does this word mean game. To which, I’ve added the second part, Where did you hear that word? So far, we haven’t hit any of George Carlin’s words. The problem is, I know my kids are plotting to see which one will be the first to get daddy to teach them those words. Until then, here’s hoping my self-editor doesn’t overheat.