Sometimes, thinking about my child growing up in a foreign country is a little scary. How can she grow up not seeing fireworks on 4th of July? Not watching Charlie Brown hunt for a perfect Christmas tree? Will she think pizza is supposed to have corn on it? Will she end up preferring fried rice over hamburgers? Is being able to grow up learning Chinese really more important than hamburgers?
Then again, some of my worries are not really about being in a different country, but being in the city as opposed to the rural surroundings I grew up in. Will she know what cows even look like in real life? (or smell like?) Worse, will she be afraid of the “wilderness”?
Then I realize that Ellie can’t possibly have, and probably doesn’t need, the exact same childhood I had. Even if I raised her in the same town, the world keeps on changing and her Saturday morning cartoons wouldn’t be the same ones I watched growing up.
There is one thing, however, that Jason and I felt was so critical to a happy childhood that it couldn’t be overlooked or ignored: a deep-seeded love for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
In the first phase of our plan to indoctrinate Ellie with PB&J love, we introduced her to bread and all things made with flour. Now, I am happy to report, some of her favorite foods include bread, pancakes and noodles.
Then, a few weeks ago we bought a jar of Skippy (really I’m a JIFF fan, but Skippy’s the only brand imported to Taiwan) and, all giddy with that parental expectation and excitement over giving your kid something fun and new, gave Ellie some bread with peanut butter on it. She sniffed it suspiciously, stuck her finger in it, took one taste and shoved the whole thing off her high chair tray. We started to get a little concerned.
We diligently continued to give Ellie some peanut butter every couple of days, until finally one day Jason reported that not only had Ellie liked her peanut butter that morning, but she kept licking it off her bread and giving him the bread back so he could smear on another layer. Woohooo! Success was ours! In fact, we were SO successful that we got our first taste of picky eating with Ellie refusing to eat her yogurt in the morning, continually pointing towards the kitchen until she got some bread with peanut butter on it.
Will I one day wonder why my child won’t eat anything but peanut butter? Maybe so, but for now she’s eating almost everything we give her, including her daily dose of peanut butter.
Here’s some more cute pictures of Ellie with her Skippy jar, because I just couldn’t choose. (Note: I did somewhat stage these pictures by handing her the jar of peanut butter, but Ellie did all the hamming up on her own.)
Next up: Jelly.
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