My Baby Eats Oreos

My Family is Having a Snack Problem

This week’s episode of Parenting is a Joke features everyone’s new mom-friend, comedian Jen Brister! We talk about how family FaceTimes from the road never result in actual conversation and then we laugh and laugh and laugh about sexism. Get caught up on episodes!

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And now we pass the baton to our favorite contributor, Lucy Huber, for today’s post.

We’re having a snack problem in my family. The problem, mainly, is too many snacks. And not enough meals. Or, really, no meals. One bite of every meal for every 17 snacks in between meals. 

I blame myself. And frankly, Costco. 

But let’s start at the beginning. I have two kids, an almost 4-year-old and a newly 1-year-old. I decided when I had kids I was going to be relaxed about snacking. I grew up in the 90s/early 2000s which meant you belonged to one of two types of families: the kind that had a pantry filled with every type of processed food you can imagine: Doritos and Fritos and Tostitos, all the itos, busting out of the cabinets, drawers filled with Gushers and Fruit Rollups, cereals with mascots, and little trays of pretzel sticks that you dunked in fluorescent orange liquid that may or may not have been cheese. Or, you grew up in a house like mine where the only snacks were a handful of almonds, rice cakes, a bag of pretzel sticks stuck in the highest possible cabinet in the kitchen so you had to pull a stool up to even look at them, or of course, unlimited apples. Nothing with a cartoon animal for miles. If my mom was feeling wild, we MIGHT have a box of Snackwell’s Devil’s Food cookies.

I don’t blame my parents for this, my dad had heart problems and was on a very specific diet, and my mom was the victim of the same type of body image diet culture madness that infiltrated my generation. They thought they were doing what was right for us by denying us the pleasures of snacking. But it gave me an unhealthy relationship with food. Well, not just that, also being a 15-year-old girl in 2003 when every magazine aimed at my demographic ran diet plans for 12-year-olds and articles about how Mischa Barton was “skinny-fat” (she looked skinny from far away, but close up you could tell she had cellulite. Ha! Ha! Ha! We caught her!) It was a dark time and I don’t think many of us escaped unscathed. But as a result of all of this, I decided, when I had kids, there would be no limitations on snacks. They could snack whenever they wanted and I wasn’t only going to limit them to healthy choices. I wasn’t exactly planning on being the Dorito pantry house, I had a very good plan for making well-balanced snacks that included the occasional chips and cookies. 

And then I actually had kids. 

My son eating potato chips in the trunk of a car.

Fast forward four years and things have gotten out of control. Yesterday my 1-year-old tottled over to the pantry, picked out her own Oreos and tottled off to our playroom to eat them by herself under our climbing structure. I’d never given her an Oreo. “How does she know what they are?” I asked my husband, astonished. This is a baby. She still drinks formula. But she could recognize the delicious junk food from a mile away. 

What started with a no-snack limit policy, but a plan to feed them filling, healthy, and delicious snacks has turned into my 4-year-old helping himself to three mini packs of Pringles a day and asking for ice cream for breakfast every morning. (One time!!! I let him have it one time!! He’ll never forget). Dinner time ends after one bite of carrot and a spoonful of pasta, but then 45 minutes later, “I’m so huuuuuungry!!!! I need a snaaaaack” and, desperate for him to sleep through the night with something in his stomach, I give in: first a banana, but then that’s not enough so some crackers, and ok, sure, I guess you can have a few cookies, too. Car rides now always involve a pack of fruit snacks. In an attempt to take the food shame out of snacking, I created entitled snack monsters. (I myself am a snack monster, too, although I’m less inclined towards the sugary processed stuff. Unless it’s white cheddar popcorn, then you better hide your Smartfood.) I’m honestly kind of worried about their salt intake. And I’m probably going to end up paying a lot at the dentist. But I’m aware it’s my fault.

Proof that sometimes Winnie eats healthy snacks!

Isn’t this the way with so many parenting things? You try not to repeat the mistakes of your past and end up creating a whole new mistake in the opposite direction. So we are trying to backtrack a little with the unlimited snacks. Go a little easier on the giant Costco packs (or stop taking the 4-year-old with us to Costco because they put those giant boxes of Oreos right out in the open). But it's hard. You want to teach a 4-year-old to listen to their body and eat when they’re hungry and to eat what fills them up but like...a lot of the time it turns out they are only hungry for ice cream and nothing else and only at 7:49pm and like, a lot of times I’m also only hungry for ice cream and nothing else at 7:49pm??

I’ll keep trying to get it right, but at least for now I take solace in the fact that while we might not always get the food thing right, we at least don’t discuss weight or diets or “feeling fat” in our house at all. And I hope they never have to open a magazine and find out that even though they’ve been eating only rice cakes for their entire childhood, some photographer could spot their cellulite on a beach from half a mile away and write a whole magazine article about it. (Hope Mischa Barton is doing okay these days). 

Don’t miss this week’s episode of Parenting is a Joke with Jen Brister and look forward to next week with comedian Julia Scotti who tells us how America’s Got Talent changed her life in more than one way.

Keep springing forward everyone!