For Better Health

We don't eat horribly, but we don't eat that well either as a family.   We should eat more fruit and have less sugar-based and refined sugar products in our pantry.   We should avoid artificial sweeteners and caffeine and we should make our own food from ingredients instead of boxes, bottles, and jars.   We should drink water instead of sodas and juice.   And we should eat a well-balanced meal.   We could also reduce carbon emissions more than we're doing with the electric cars and solar combined if only we'd remove beef from our diets.  

That's a lot of shoulds.  Some of those things we don't do, like drinking artificial sweeteners.   The children almost always drink water with the rare exception of having a soda at a restaurant.  Or now, with the rare exception to be allowed to have one of the few sodas in the house.  We don't eat out much at this point, but we weren't eating out that much in general before COVID-19.   

We need to increased the fruit we consume and reduce the sugars.   That one is probably our biggest challenge.   My husband cooks most dinners and he's good at cooking healthful meals.   The trouble is, we tend to do processed foods for breakfast and soups and noodles pre-packaged for lunch a lot.   Some of those choices aren't that bad, but some of them aren't ideal. 

My husband has taken a step and the rest of us are following, which we do by default since he's our, "cooker" as my children used to call him.   I'd like to instill good eating habits in my children, but to do so, I need to have them myself first. 

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Housework Update:  You wouldn't think an hour-and-a-half of housework would be such torture to a child.   My children weren't in the mood to help clean the house so I got a lot of excuses today.  None of them worked.  Not only that, when they persisted in complaining, I added time to the duration we'd be cleaning.   That didn't go over well.  I taught them how to do different cleaning tasks they've never really done because we've had someone clean the house since they were babies.   Currently, we're on our own.   At the end of the time, after running back and forth, coming to their calls for help or when they asked what to do next, my daughter was cranky and hungry and said, "you didn't even clean anything.  That's totally not fair."