Granted I will still be pregnant (and losing weight will not be my goal until May), but none the less my family’s eating habits are going to be undergoing a major renovation.
So lets start with Ryan shall we…
Okay so my poor husband came back “home” for Christmas/New Years and right away I could tell he put on some extra weight since August. In their dorm rooms they cannot have microwaves or toasters and they rely on their food supply from either the mess hall (up there with Harding Uni’s cafeteria food) or eating out. So all these circumstances have shown their effects on him.
Much of this applies to Ronan as well, being that we are both living at my inlaws. But the food I’m eating here, is definitely much off the path of what I’m accoustomed to eating in my own home. Things are more bland and usually centered around the main “meat” dish. There isnt much vegtables present, and if they are they are almost always from cans. I could go on and on about how much I despise canned vegtables. Besides the lack of nutritional value, they almost always are way too salty, lack flavour, and just have that yucky “I-came-from-a-can” taste. We do have salads at almost every meal…a very small salad, and everyones but mine is covered in croutons and yucky gross salad dressings to hide any actual taste the salad may have contained prior to be drowned. Fruit shows up as well in small bowls, and comes dripping from the high frutose cornsyrup it was saturated in from either jar or can. It is almost comical, how my inlaws table shows the appearance of trying to eat “healthier” while it seems they have definitly made a wrong turn somewhere….somewhere in the shopping market. That and the amount of food they eat equals the cause to the added weight they both carry. I remember even Ryan telling me that when hes home and he doesnt eat all the food his mother wishes he would eat, she gets offended. Yes this could be compared to a culture custom in another country, but this matter doesnt stop here. They then try to push their food ideals on us. Its one thing for me to say that I dont want Ronan to have milk from a cow, and to drink soy milk instead. Its another for them to give Ronan things like dairy milk, hot dogs, ketchup, etc with out my consent. I’m not pushing them to drink soymilk. I didnt even move here with all my food ideals. Day one, I dropped the bread thing I have, and decided to just make do with what they buy. (I’ll spend 20 minutes in a store untill I find the right bread that does not contain the words “Enriched” or “High Frutose Cornsyrup”…you try it…its hard…esp. finding ones that dont have both of them in their ingredients.)
I have stopped picking the same battles, and choosing which ones to have. Which has backfired on me many times now with them saying they “didnt know better”. Whatev. And then the whole “forgetting” thing and doing things after he hasnt been allowed to have them. Or making decisions about them. I have never wanted Ronan to have ketchup. One its awful for him to eat and two he eats it like a food group and not with frenchfries. So apparently over christmas break, my “wonderful” brother in law taught Ronan how to eat ketchup correctly. First without my consent. Then I found out about it after telling Ronan he couldnt have ketchup, and having them reprimand me saying they taught him how to eat it correctly. Um excuse me…who gave you that right?
Okay so now this blog is going to stretch on to me being walked over as his mother. Number one pet peeve…telling me how to raise my son. I dont care who you are. Advice is good yes…but none of this making me feel like Ronan’s 16 year old babysitter, compared to his mother. It will send up a red flag and my defense mechanisms wil kick in right away. People say im like…super nice, and such. Well you want to see the bitch come out…go ahead…say something about my children.
So what did Ryan, Ronan, and I eat while were were living as a family in Monterey? True we didnt get to eat as much fresh vegtables and fruit as I was accustomed to in my family, due to the cost of these items. But we never came back from the commissary with out something from the produce department. The items we bought from cans contained either beans or some form of tomatoes. We ate a lot of pasta and a lot of rice dishes. We hardly ate red meat, and instead ate lots of turkey and fish. Its kinda comical but we either eat “italian” or “asian” styled foods. Ronan did drink only soymilk and only had one or two glasses a day (compared to the cazilion glasses of milk my inlaws give him daily) but I gave him his calcium and vitamin D from other foods and my doctor said I was feeding him correctly. Despite what my inlaws tell me. Ronan was not (who knows what my inlaws sneak to him) allowed any juice whatsoever. I dont care if it says 100% fruit…thats not the point. The point is i didnt want him to have any. I want him to love water, and not say “juice juice juice” all the time, stray away from cavaties and unneeded sugar, etc.
Things I really miss from my diet before: Spicy foods (my father in law complains it hurts his tummy…hmmm…i wonder what all that sausage pizza and heavy, calorie filled, smothered, covered, greesy food is doing to it), Tea (I refuse to make tea by boiling water in the microwave…and im tired of explaining to my mother in law why making tea correctly means a lot to me), Organic food…*omg* (wish you were a bee in my house when i was explaining my excitement to mil when i heard they were selling organic cherrios now. I think first i had to explain what organic meant to my confused mother in law and hten why i was excited…finally it just wasnt worth it and i said, “nevermind”. We use to be giving Ronan a little bit of extra stuff to put in his porridge every morning to help with protein. I cant remember the name of it, but something you can get in a health food store….well i think its been long lost in a cabinet away somewhere. Instead they want to give him child vitamins…why not just feed him correctly?
I’m sure there is more….I do hate being told i eat a lot of cereal. So…I’m supposed to be drinking 5 glasses of skin milk a day, and eating cereal is the only way i know how to do that with the glasses i drink already. It helps with me eating small more frequent meals too. I dont verbalize all that I am writting here that bugs me about what they eat…so why say stuff to me.
I just hate the “well this is what we do” comments they say (especially from my fil..he says it the most) about how they raise ronan. Well what the hell…who am I. And to this a week or so ago the hormones caught up to me and I just got up yelled something at them ran to my room and slammed the door like some crazy 14 year old and started crying. Somehow I got Ronan in there with me and just wanted to move out wiht him that very second. All the while my fil is ont he other side of my door giving me the speach on why kids should have dairy. Yeah….whatev….i’ve done my own research too, and our bodies arent made to digest dairy, so boo on that theory. And why must we live the same nutritional rules you do…I’m not forcing my thinking on you…just for my child mostly.
Gah.
*Goes back to find a calandar to count down the days till Ryan gets here….and then the days until we leave..even if that date is still yet to be determined.*
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