Snacks

My mother in law is a lovely woman  and often sends us food parcels from the wilds of Wakayama just in case we can't buy tea or honey on the out skirts of Tokyo! The problem is that, the last few parcels she has sent contain boxes of snacks for Ebi-kun, chocolate and biscuit type snacks. I made the mistake of letting him have them at snack time and so now that is all he wants. Most of the time Ebi-kun is a good eater, he will try ANYTHING and enjoys his food - he is painfully slow at eating though, a 3 hour lunch would suit him just fine! I have noticed though, since he has been on his 'bad' snack kick that he isn't eating well at meal times, so yesterday I decided it was time we had a talk. I explained about healthy and unhealthy foods and why they are that way. Then I made two labels and put them on the table and asked him to get some things out of the draw/fridge and sort them as he did it.

He did quite well with it all, he was confused with the jam because it has fruit in it but then we talked about the sugar content. I am not anti chocolate (in fact the opposite is more the truth) so we talked about eating these things in moderation and that it is OK to have them once in a while and we also touched on the subject of marketing, goods having popular kids characters on them and how these goods are often the unhealthy ones. He concluded that the milk should have Doremon on it because he is a cat and cats drink milk and milk is healthy!

Then I asked him to prepare his snack by himself

He picked dried soy beans, raisins and strawberries, three things because he is 3, in the 3 dish, with 3 strawberries. (Do your kids do this?)
We also did some work, language work is the favourite still, he got out the sound pouches and then started to spell out the words - that was before the zebra and grasshopper had a fight and then the praying mantis had to ride the skateboard to the police station!
Ebi-kun was super excited this morning because we woke up to snow, sadly it has turned to rain and has almost all gone already, he wants to make a snowman so much, perhaps those of you will loads of the white stuff could send us a box full each and then we can make one :o)