Milk

Milk

/ Shane / 1 Comment

When Evie was younger, the doctor wasn’t happy about her weight. This is well documented on this blog. The doctor insisted that she needed to be drinking more milk.

We tried everything we could think of to get her to drink milk, and she just wasn’t interested. However, we didn’t want to push it and force her to drink it, which would result in her hating it. No big deal, we thought. She likes drinking water and we didn’t want to discourage that. We just made sure she got calcium in other ways, such as vitamins morning and night and encouraging her 3 yogurt a day habit.

“Not good enough!” shouted the doctor, “She has to drink MILK! Milk, milk, MILK!” “You know, people haven’t really been drinking milk all that long in the grand scheme of things,” replied Sara, “What did they do before there was milk to drink?” The doctor replied sweetly, “They were all malnourished and died back then.”

Quite frankly, we didn’t buy it. And now our strategy has paid off. Evie chugs milk like it is going out of style. It’s gotten to the point that we get tired of filling her glass, and tell her she can’t have any more. That’s right, we’re actually restricting her from drinking milk! Whoever thought we’d get to the point that she would actually cry because she couldn’t have milk?

It can be hard as a parent to do what you feel is the right thing to do, especially in the face of opposition from your doctor. However, I feel (in this one case at least) completely vindicated by this turn of events. A short-term weight gain does not out weigh a long-term childhood love of milk.

Take that modern medicine!

(By the way, she still calls it Outback Milk)

“Outback” Milk

/ Shane / 6 Comments

The other day, we drove miles and miles to go to one of our favorite restaurants, Outback Steakhouse. Hey Outback, what’s the deal with the Outback-free bubble over Chicago? A lot of people live here, you might want to give it a try!

Anyway, we were ordering Evie a kids meal and we decided we might as well order her a milk. We knew she wouldn’t drink it, but it came with the meal, so we thought “might as well”. We have tried since the dawn of time to get that girl to drink milk, she is not interested. Right about the time that she was quitting bottles, we had some success giving her milk in a bottle, but I think that was the bottle nostalgia factor. Other than that, nada. And when I say we tried, I mean it! We started drinking milk ourselves with every meal, we tried calling it different names, we bought fun Elmo cups that could be used only for milk, we even let Evie decorate cups herself with cow stickers. I even remember a string of a couple of nights were Sara and I would “moo” every time we took a drink! She wasn’t having it.

So imagine my surprise when she started going to town on the glass of milk at Outback! Quick to seize the opportunity, I started saying things like, “How is that Outback Milk?” or “Mmm, you really like Outback Milk, don’t you?” Then we went to the store and bought some 2% milk (we have previously tried whole and skim, plus a couple of custom-made varieties involving a mixture of skim and half-and-half). The 2% carton is blue, which we told her indicates Outback Milk. We also dug out a few cups that looked as close as possible to the cup she had at Outback, including some straws.

So far, it seems to be working! She is sucking that stuff down like there’s no tomorrow. I’m sure she will pull her usual stunt and decide tomorrow that she’s totally off the milk again, so I’m holding my breath. Overall though, even if this only goes on for a couple of weeks, I think we did a most excellent job of thinking on our feet and capitalizing on a situation.