Vegetable dilemma solved (at least for now)

I should have titled this post, "We are Idiots." Because, We, who should have known better, have been willingly giving Rachel a snack on the way home. It's always granola, so it's always nutritious, but OF COURSE SHE'S NOT HUNGRY FOR DINNER BECAUSE HER LITTLE TUMMY IS ALREADY FULL OF SO-CALLED NUTRITIOUS FOOD WHEN REALLY ALL SHE'S EATEN IS A SUGARY TREAT MASQUERADING AS SOMETHING GOOD FOR HER!

Now that I've finished flagellating myself..

Drew refused to provide Rachel with
a snack on Tuesday and Wednesday night, but he offered her carrots on the way home from school. She held on to them but refused to eat them. When she got home she was starving so she ate a good dinner both nights -- pasta, challah, string cheese and CARROTS. Drew bought a bag of pre-peeled baby carrots and sliced them up; for some reason it's easier for her to handle if she has just a couple of pieces on her plate -- and she ate them! Not exactly willingly, and Drew had to get on her case to follow through, but she did eat one carrot on Wednesday and one carrot on Thursday. He praised her lavishly.

"Mommy will be SO PROUD of me!" Rachel told him. And as soon as she told me Wednesday morning, I said, "I am SO PROUD of you!"

"How proud are you?" she said.

"THIS much!" I said, holding my hands out wide.

Tonight she said, "If I ate four carrots, how proud would you be?"

"I'd be so proud, my arms wouldn't even stretch that far," I answered.

"You'd fall down and bonk your head!" she exclaimed. "And then I'd give you an icee."
Tonight I admittedly pushed my luck a bit -- I cut up more than one carrot and put a whole pile of slices on a small plate. She looked dismayed and said, face quivering, "but when DADDY gives me a carrot, he just gives me one." So I made a big deal of sweeping about half the slices into my salad, acting like I was doing her a tremendous favor, and told her to eat the rest (which was still quite a sizable pile). She ate almost all of them, but when she said she couldn't eat any more, I gave her a break. I had made her hold off on the challah until she finished the carrots, and she didn't ask for dessert, so I just gave her a piece of challah and called it good.

"You know," I told Drew when he returned, calmed down, from the gym the other night, "this is just the first of many battles we'll have with her."

"I know," he replied. "That's why I want to let her know early that she won't always get her way."