My rant of the day...fruit snacks

How many of you moms shudder when you hear the familiar wail of "fruit snacks" (always pronounced "fooooooohhhhht saaaaaks," of course, despite the child's clear developmental ability to pronounce the word properly)? I have a love hate relationship with this particular food. On the one hand, what else can earn you an extra 5 minutes to run through the checkout line at the grocery store when your 2 year old starts going berserk for no apparent reason? On the other hand, unless you have great dental insurance & a high tolerance for listening to your kiddo cry during a cavity filling, there might be some longterm drawbacks.

Before my daughter was born, and honestly until she reached that 18 month mark where they start thinking independently, I swore I was never going to give my child fruit snacks. All that sugar, artificial colors, and the sheer stickiness of it...no way! But then, at that 18 month checkup, the pediatrician mentioned that my child was hovering around the 5th% in weight, and suggested we fatten her up. I'm sure the doc meant well, but this sent me into panic mode. How do you fatten up a kid who won't touch those nutrition shakes and lives off of peas, broccoli, cucumber, and cereal? I evaluated Sophia's diet and determined that the only food group she was really lacking was fruit (you know, since I of course had pledged not to give her fruit juice either). Enter the fruit snacks. I saw them at the store and was pleasantly surprised to see 100% of her vitamin C, as well as 10% of various other vitamins which sound important. So I bought them, and it's been downhill from that point on.

I do limit her to one a day. Usually. And I try to keep some guidelines about when she can have them...such as no fruit snacks for breakfast (again, usually...of course, the day when she had a candy cane for breakfast is a whole other story for a different post). But I can now gauge how well the day is going to be by how far into the morning we get without her sprinting to the pantry door, desperately doing pull-ups from the doorknob which is covered with that handy child-proof cover (and oh how I fear the day when she figures out how to dismantle that beautiful invention), screaming for fruit snacks...tears instantly screaming down her face. The worst is when she doesn't go straight to tantrum mode...when she looks at me, lower lip puffed out, and politely says, "can I have fuit saks please momma? pretty please?" Who can say no to that?

Well, apparently not me. Because my child generally eats a lunch of hot dogs (also on my list of foods I'd never give my child...but hey, they're turkey ones, so it's ok, right???), fruit juice (mixed with water, of course), and fruit snacks. And no, for the record, she hasn't gained any weight yet. I'm sure once Baby #2 is born I'll have the energy and strength to say no more often & enforce the healthy eating rules, right? LOL.