Sunday 7 December 2008

They're all the same...

6 months ago, we had just returned from 5 weeks in Australia. Whilst I was out there, I worked out that by the age of 2 1/2 years old, my younger son had:

Flown more miles in his life to date than I had flown in the first 30 years of mine...
...visited more countries so far than I had in the first 20 of mine...
...eaten squid approximately 20 years earlier in his life than I did...
...eaten avocado approximately 15 years earlier than I did...
...eaten papaya approximately 27 years earlier than I did...

...and that my older son, having achieved all of the above by the age of 5 (though obviously not knowingly eaten the fruit or veg), had also visited 5 separate continents. It took me 41 years to achieve the same thing.

Pretty cosmopolitan, huh? And yet. Boy #1's favourite food? The dish he prizes above all others, that always elicits 'You're the best mum in the whole world!' exclamations, and which he gets perhaps once a year at home (though slightly more often if we go out - I mean, you want to order something the children are actually going to eat, right?)...


Fish and chips.

10 comments:

  1. The gourmet delights of the younger set! We could always guarantee that, if all else failed, our younger son would eat a white bread, fish-finger sandwich and such was my desperation at times, that's what he got! BTW he still eats them but with rye bread now. See, Travel does broaden the mind - and appetite;-)

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  2. My oldest spent an entire week in Majorca at the age of 2 eating and drinking nothing but milk and bread. I decided that he wouldn't come to any harm on that, and that I wasn't going to allow it to spoil my holiday. Yours sounds superbly adventurous.

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  3. Having lived in California, our travels by car only took us places inside the United States, so my kids never had to eat strange foreign foods. Oddly enough, they grew up to like many exotic things and were willing to try anything. My son's biggest deal was going out to a restaurant for his 8th birthday with us and eating lobster. He loved that. I think that was the best meal he ever had.

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  4. I'm with him on fish and chips; it was on my top 7s list.

    We went on a ski-ing holiday when Littleboy 1 was 9 months old. He refused to eat French babyfood jars and lived off bananas and milk for the entire week!

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  5. Hi,

    I am Joanne from http://www.NextGenParenting.com and it is a website that talks about parenting the new generation. We found

    that there is a lot of synergy and relevance in both our websites and hope to be able to collaborate with you through a link

    exchange. Our Facebook Group is at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=45846456053.

    I was wondering whether you would like to do a link exchange with us, by putting a link under your Parenting Resources /

    Links section and we will also put your blog link on our blog site at http://www.nextgenparenting.com/blog.

    You are also welcome to contribute articles to be posted at our blog with a link back to you.

    You can contact me at joanne@NextGenParenting.com.

    Hope to hear from you soon.


    Best regards,

    Joanne Kok
    http://www.NextGenParenting.com

    ReplyDelete
  6. My daughter's favourite food, I want for my birthday, is burritos!

    Between my husband and the kids, we enough frequest flyer miles for 1st class tickets around the world, theoretically. Can't seem to ever get a flight when we need one!

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  7. A good old fashioned British lad at heart. I love it!

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  8. Yes, my kids all have their own mileage cards! I can't say they'll all eat "anything" but we're getting there. Of course they all like different things and the oldest if a "red meat" vegetarian. Sigh.
    Sadly, we can't seem to get good fish and chips over here.

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  9. Sharon - rye bread? You did well...

    Iota, we have those weeks too, I promise.

    Irene, how wonderful. Kids are amazing sometimes, aren't they?

    NVG , and yet, he's still with us. Amazing isn't it how much we worry when they don't eat their greens and yet they still grow up big and strong.

    Hi Joanne, thanks for visiting and will get back to you off-blog...

    Modern, that's the problem with air miles isn't it? We thought we were being oh-so-clever once booking airmile flights one year in advance on the date that seats were supposedly released. Ha! All the double plus +++ gold /platinum / titanium card holders had been given special dispensation to do it weeks before us...

    Tara - I wouldn't really have it any other way!

    EPM, that must be frustrating. I used to live with a couple of flatmates like that. I mean, meat is meat, right? You either eat it or you don't... (though, apparantly, not.)

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  10. Yep, daughter has eaten many exotic foods, but her favourite - tinned pasta! (I blame my MIL)

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