A Corny Story

Ask any mom, particularly us stay at home kind, and she'll tell you the one thing that takes up the majority of her day is feeding the kids.  You've got three meals to feed them, well that's if you want them to grow.  Then there's the clean up afterward EVERY TIME.  Perhaps not all moms clean up after every meal, but I try to.  I'd be afraid of what my kitchen would look like at 8pm if I didn't.  Actually, I know what it looks like, because there have been days here and there where I couldn't get to it.  I can tell you, it ain't pretty.  Not to mention how many times I have to swiffer the floor.  The kitchen floor is the bain of my existence.  I wish we had a dog for the sole purpose of eating the food off the floor.  What is boils down to is feeding three kids, three meals a day is tiresome.  So when I can take a short cut here or there without sacrificing nutrition, I do.  

Most of the time breakfast is simple, cereal, oatmeal that kind of thing.  Lunch will be some kind of sandwich or possibly leftovers from dinner the night before.  Since Andy isn't home for dinner during the week, I make them something separate from us.  I try to make healthy meals, that they'll eat, and I always give them a fruit with breakfast and vegetable with lunch and dinner.   For a while they were eating corn on the cob, a lot.  Well there was a reason for that.  A little side story:

Andy plants a little garden every spring, usually tomatoes, peppers, and herbs.  This year he decided to try corn.  He and Sonya planted a few in an open area in our backyard.  There were quite a few leftover seeds and Sonya wanted them to plant around the yard.  Andy and I let her, assuming they wouldn't grow, because she didn't know what she was doing.  Turns out she  knew what she was doing better than we did.  Her corn grew EVERYWHERE in our yard. I do mean everywhere.  We must have had about 20 stalks around the parameter of our yard.  We thought there was no way it would actually yield any corn, but oh yes it did.

Sonya was so excited about her corn, that's all she wanted to eat for a while.  So I let her have it.  After all, she put in the effort to plant it, and it is a vegetable so it's good for her.  However, there was a bit of a problem with it, it had a bit of a mushiness to it.  The first bite would be crunchy, but then as you chewed it was kind of mushy.  Still she loved it.  I tried it without cooking it first, thinking that maybe the mushiness meant I overcooked it, but no, it was crunchy on the first bite, then mushy.  Although, it did seem to be a bit better if you didn't cook it.  So I decided that I wouldn't cook it when they wanted to eat it.  You can eat corn raw and I didn't really want to put butter on it anyway, so I saw no problem with it.  Plus you know if you've eaten corn on the cob before, that you have to wait 5 weeks for it to cool off, if you don't want burnt taste buds.  Kids aren't so patient with waiting for things to cool off.  Therefore, you spend half their meal telling them not to eat, and they keep asking to eat it, so you finally tell them, "fine just eat it!"  and when they do it's still to hot and they end up crying and whining because they burned off their taste buds.  All the better NOT to heat it up I figured.  I save myself time, whining, and the corn is more crunchy.  Plus they're kids, what do they care? Turns out, they do.

(Andy told me this part of the story over the weekend when our friends were here.)  A couple weeks ago we were all having dinner on a Saturday night, and the kids were eating the last of the corn crop.  Andy had questioned why I didn't cook the corn and I told him my reasoning.  He just looked at me with that, "whatever woman" look.  I get that a lot, but when it comes to the kids, he trusts I know what I'm doing.  Usually, I do.  The two younger girls were done eating, so I took them to start their baths.  When I left, Andy looked at Sonya eating her corn and said, 

"How's the corn?  Is it good?"

"Yeah," she said half hearted, "but to tell you the truth, I like it better cooked."

He laughed and replied, "yeah so do I."  

Here I had been giving her corn for a couple weeks uncooked, and she was disappointed every time.  Yet, she never said anything to me.  It's not that it's hard to cook.  I mean one minute in the micro is all it would have taken to make the kid happy, but no, I didn't do it.  Great, mommy sucks.

From now on all corn on the cob will be cooked in our house, even if it means extra clean up time and more whining to listen to.  I love my girls, and damnit, if they want cooked corn, then that's what they'll get!  Besides, in a few years they'll be cleaning up the kitchen after meals themselves.  That will give me even more time to cook their corn.  Perhaps to even boil or grill it!