Lentils and ice cream.
When our daughter had hands foot mouth disease, my husband and I struggled to get her to eat or drink anything. Her mouth and throat hurt, so the lack of eating made sense and was to be expected, but that didn’t make it any easier to solve. We tried many recommendations, but it seemed that things were either healthy or edible, and nothing was both.
Then, one day after lunch, my husband texted me, “I fed her lentils and ice cream. She ate lots.”
Wow, I thought. How creative. A nutrient-packed legume mixed in with the creamy cold deliciousness of vanilla ice cream – brilliant!
So, the next day, when I couldn’t get our daughter to eat anything on our plates, I whipped up some lentils and ice cream. My husband stared at me in surprise. It turned out that he had fed her lentils, then ice cream, separately, while I had understood it to be a single, enticing, superfood dish. But the way she scarfed down her lentils and ice cream, mixed together, convinced us that this is the single greatest food we have found for feeding children with sore throats or mouths.
There you have it: lentils and ice cream, the hack that comes to you courtesy of a miscommunication with sanity-saving implications.
What’s your best “sick” food for littles, especially when typical foods are painful to eat?
Abby the Sociologist Doula 