What to feed the Picky

Ok, so I recently started working part-time from home so that I could stay home with the kids. This is awesome for many reasons - we are no longer paying a bajillion dollars each month for day care; no one has to leave the office early all the time to get the children to extra-curricular activities; and I get the lovely opportunity to avoid the everyday office stuff that is stressful and lame.

However, I’m careening around a learning curve again. This is going to sound weird, but one of the biggest things I’m struggling with right now is what to feed the kids for breakfast and lunch.

Before we start sounding like horrible parents, keep in mind that between day care and school, the kids were fed both breakfast and lunch. And even snacks. On the weekends of course we fed them, but it was more like pancakes and bacon and more time (and cost) intensive meals.

Obviously the time-intensive stuff doesn’t bother me – I now have time to cook them breakfast. But bacon and eggs and pancakes aren’t something they should necessarily eat every day, and yet I feel that cereal gets boring if eaten every day. Where’s the happy breakfast medium?

As for lunch, they love things like cheese and crackers and turkey. But that’s about the limit. Again, I’m trying to keep our meals from being too repetitive.

My kids are picky eaters – the older one has been raised on mostly fast food and frozen meals (did I mention that their birth mom doesn’t really cook?) and so getting her to try more adventurous and FRESH meals is a challenge. The little one loves healthy food, but I find it hard to get her to eat anything more than fruit. Which isn’t bad, but also she needs more nutrition than that.

The other hurdle I run into is that every other week, they’re away from us, and so I feel like the week of efforts is undone and the struggle begins again when they come back. However, maybe now that I’m feeding them breakfast and lunch every day, that will change.  Which of course is why I’m so concerned with helping them make good food choices.

I love to cook and I love to experiment with new recipes. I’m just not sure how to encourage the girls to try new things and how to permanently introduce better, more healthy food choices into their limited meal vocabularies.

AND, if I make something and they turn up their noses at it, do I make them try it anyway and then make it again another time in an attempt to get them “used” to the taste of it?

I need some input - any suggestions?