Let Them Eat Cake

This is a tough call.  I love cake.  I love dessert in general.  And I love making dessert and watching my families happy face when they enjoy the fruits of my labor.  Active kids can afford the calories of dessert.  But by serving it every night, aren't we training them to want something sweet everyday?  Is that bad/healthy?  Haven't we been trained to want something sweet after dinner?  I'm looking into some healthy, low calorie options (Daisy's shock collar does come to mind) for myself and my family.

I started a Facebook Fan Page a while ago, "Stop Children's Snacks After Every Sporting Event".  I felt very passionate about this when the kids started playing organized sports when they were like 5.  I just didn't understand why there was a concerted effort to organize a parent to bring cookies and a juice box (probably at least 400 calories of junk) every time the kids ran around for maybe an hour.  You can imagine my kids horror when I broke ranks a few times and passed around clementines.  When my kids were like 8 or 9, they actually accused me of being cheap because they thought I was just trying to cut costs by serving clementines.  I've gone to extremes to avoid "snacks"; ignored emails, tolerated the organizing moms' dirty looks, looked "shocked" when somebody brings out snacks.  It was never about being cheap, I never believed in the premise, and tried to not participate (which basically meant other people just supplied my kids with snacks).  Aren't we just overindulging our kids?  "Snacks" is like buying their participation at an early age to get them to like exercise?  I actually had a soccer mom early on tell me, "kids play for snacks".  Well, that's not good training for adulthood - period!  Anyway, I'm never going to "Stop Snacks", but I'm glad my kids are older and I don't have to deal with team snacks anymore. 

Just for the record, I feel the same about birthday party goodie bags.  Total overindulgence of junk!!  When did this bag of junk get started?  I don't remember having goodie bags.  Of course back in my day, you chose a party (which consisted of cake and ice cream) or a present.  I tried to simplify the birthday celebrations here, but cutting out the party goodie bag was basically touted as possibly ruining my childs' social life for the rest of their life and you'd hate for anyone to think that you are just a party pooper or worse cheap.

So this is where I feel totally hypocritical; dessert.  Aren't we trained that we deserve a treat at the end of the day?  And you know what maybe we do, so I'm thinking of just trying to mix up the options.  One of my gym instructors recently raved about Asian Pears and Blue Cheese; yum!!  I recently served up pear, pineapple, sliced apples as options and you know what; everyone ate it and liked it; including myself.  I'm sure that didn't prevent one of my 13 year old boys from hitting the snack cabinet and grabbing some cookies out of my sight (or so he thought).  I recently bought a huge selection of Skinny Cow Ice Cream Sandwiches (140 calories each).  They are great.  I stocked up on sherbets.  I've made Angel Food Cake from scratch (a good low calorie option and fat free) and it was so good.

I firmly believe life is a celebration which to me equals dessert.  It's hard to avoid dessert most nights.  So why not indulge, but make it smart.   And jeez, if you can't eat dessert when you're a 13 old boy when can you?  Anyway, last night I did enjoy a reasonable serving of Rainbow Sherbet.  Oh my gosh, haven't had sherbet in a long time, yummy!  So smart dessert options are part of my "Spring Training" mantra; join me.