Pizza Party

We ate pizza for supper the other night. This is actually a rare event in our house that happens about once a month. Just one pizza is too much for us to eat, and we usually order multiple pizzas since the best deals seem to come in bulk. I imagine that once the boys are old enough to help us finish the leftovers by eating one whole pizza each, we’ll order it more often. For now though, I wrap up the uneaten pizza and throw it in the freezer where it usually remains forgotten until the next time we order pizza and I need to make room for new leftovers. Our freezer is an archeologist’s dream of layered leftover pizza, each slice representing a month from our lives. I’m pretty sure that we have pizza in our freezer that’s older than our marriage, and of the dozens of hyperbolic statements I make, that sadly isn’t one of them.

I have been making Abbie her own meal of things like pasta or hot dogs, but now I’m trying to feed Abbie the same thing I eat. All of the parenting resources I’ve seen recommend doing sharing identical meals so the child doesn’t start expecting to eat a unique meal for supper. Since I usually end up making Ellie her own entrée, that would mean I’d have to make three entrees for every meal. Besides being a colossal drain on my time, I don’t think our refrigerator could hold all those leftovers with so much pizza in the way.

With sharing in mind, I removed the smallest piece from the circle, placed it on a plate, and lovingly cut it into toddler-sized pieces. Abbie hasn’t grasped the concept of biting smaller pieces off a larger hunk of food like pizza or carrot sticks, instead opting to stick the whole thing in her mouth or nothing at all. While I do enjoy watching Abbie unhinge her jaw in an attempt to consume a pretzel whole, Ellie usually scolds me when I let her do it saying something about choking hazards. I guess if a pretzel could almost take down the most powerful man in the world, it should have no trouble with a toddler.

I took the plate of pizza bits, and dumped them on Abbie’s high chair tray. She looked at the pizza with its gooey cheese and sausage chunks too large to stay on the tiny pieces, looked back at the Tasteeos also populating her tray, and immediately moved to sweep the less desirable food onto the floor. Much to the dog’s delight, this meant she was trying to dispose of her pizza.

This wasn’t a big surprise to me. Despite starting her life on solids with the willingness of a baby bird to eat just about anything we offer, she’s starting to become pickier. I already knew that she doesn’t like cheese unless it forms some sort of sauce a la macaroni and cheese. It had been a few months since I last tried giving her pizza, and I hoped she’d learned to accept it like every other child on Earth, but no luck. I tired making it a game, tried showing her that I wanted to eat it, and tried forcing her to try some thinking she’d like it if she got a taste, but she refused to take it. Discouraged, I offered her a food that I knew she’d eat: Broccoli. Even if Abbie isn’t the only child on Earth who refuses to eat pizza, she has to be the only one who refuses pizza and loves broccoli.

She greedily snapped up the broccoli like I expected. I left the pizza on her tray in the hope that she might come back to it after the broccoli, or possibly slip a piece in her mouth by accident in her gluttony, but no luck there either. I finally removed the pizza from her tray and set it on my plate for my consumption. I might have saved it for her to try again at a later meal, but our refrigerator is out of space.