Chalk and Cheese Chronicles

The Real Reason My Boys Play Soccer - Junk Food!

I tried to set the precedent, by bringing a relatively healthy snack when I was snack mom for my boys' soccer team. After polling my Facebook friends, I decided to bring orange slices for half time and chocolate spreckled homemade muffins plus water for the after-game snack.

Those muffins have always been a hit with my kids and their friends.

Today, the post-game snack was a bag of popcorn (artificially flavored) and a brightly colored beverage called Little Hug Fruit Barrel. My boys were overjoyed at such luck. They held onto their drinks tightly and gulped them down. So yummy. "You never let us have drinks like this, " they scolded.

"I think it's Gatorade, " added clueless hubby.

A press release describes the beverage as  having a "big fruit taste they love without the sugar overload" but to my tastebuds, that drink is one of the sweetest drinks I've ever had.

The press release goes on to proclaim that Little Hug Fruit Barrel drinks contain, "75% less sugar than other leading brands and only 10 calories" and apparently is also fortified with vitamins "B and E" for energy.

So what is making that drink so darned sweet? Surely, it must contain an articifial sweetener. Surely,  the drink doesn't get it's uber bright rainbow of colors from real fruit? What is in it? Is it really a Gatorade-like drink, as hubby thinks?

A Google search failed to come up with the list of ingredients.

I generally allow my kids to partake in what everyone else is eating when we are not at home (social acceptance trumps mom's control issues) but let's just say I cring. A lot.

Even the promise of a post-game chocolate milk at Starbucks will be rejected by my kids in the face of a brightly colored, sugary drink offered to them on the soccer field.

I know I can't control everything my kids do.  It also seems that parents of kids age 5 and under are more health-food conscious - it all seems to slide downhill after 1st grade, as kids get out from under our protective umbrella and see what else is out there.

But the question remains, why is there so much junk food on the soccer field?

 

This is an original post to Chalk and Cheese Chronicles.

À bicyclette!

Cue the Yves Montand, my boys are riding bikes!

Last summer, my then 4.75-year-old boys had been riding their heavy 18 (or 19"?) bicycles with training wheels since this past spring. We'd long since abandoned the tiny 12 (or 13"?) bicycles with training wheels since graduating to the bigger bikes. But the mom from whom we'd purchased both sets of bikes (at different times) told me to go back to the smaller bikes when it came time to learning to ride without training wheels. "Remove the training wheels and the pedals then take them to a small, grassy hill and they'll learn to balance," she said.

I'd known for some time that my boys were ready to ride those 12' bikes. The only problem was that those tiny bikes lived at grandpa's home for short rides down his street and in his back yard. Grandpa didn't believe the boys were ready, always erring on the "older is better" side - for everything. I begged him to take off the training wheels. "Then we'll give it a try the next time we're over, " I explained. But every week when we visited, the training wheels remained on. Finally, I just removed the training wheels myself (but kept the pedals on), brought my boys to a local school and within minutes, my boys were pedaling and pedaling fast. This was three months ago. Most of our same-age friends also hit this milestone around the same time.

Three year's ago, while vacationing in Bend, Oregon, the Target there had wooden balance bikes (similar to the popular Skuut) on clearance for TWELVE DOLLARS. I don't know if it was some kind of reverse psychology, but I didn't go for it. My mom told me, "You have so much stuff for the boys already," and it was true, I'd been trying to downsize the number of toys. I walked away without the balance bikes. They usually run around about $100 so I really should have snapped up those bikes at Target. What was I thinking? They could have been up on their bikes years ago! But then again, why would I want that?