No More Nuggets!

Lucy didn't finish her dinner last night. She barely touched it, in fact. She was complaining that her tummy hurt, and that usually means she's gassy, but something in the way she was saying it made me second-guess that theory this time. Against our usual policy, I let her leave the table having eaten only about a quarter of a slice of cucumber, convincing Daddy that we shouldn't force it this time.

Call it mother's intuition, call it a hunch or a gut feeling (no pun intended), I just had a bad feeling about how the night would go.

Let me say a little more about our day. We stopped on the way home from church to pick up a few items from Wendy's dollar menu. Lucy had the chicken nuggets and finished 4 out of 5 of them, with the incentive that for each nugget she finished she got a whole french fry. Good stuff, huh? Well, after putting her to bed, still complaining of an aching tummy, we found ourselves rushing into her room just after 10 PM to, you guessed it, chicken nuggets all over the bed and a Lucy whose tummy didn't hurt anymore. Ugh.

I was SO grateful for that "intuition" that told me something was different about how she said her tummy hurt. Something told me not to force her to finish her dinner (or even to start it, for that matter). Instead of a couple of half-digested nuggets, we would have been dealing with a plate-full of lazagna. Double UGH!

The last time we encountered this scenario, when I was about 8 months pregnant, Lucy had eaten chicken nuggets for dinner. It doesn't take a sleuth to see the connection here. We have already virtually eliminated hot dogs from her diet for the same pattern, and now we're looking at processed chicken, too. The real deal -- all white meat chicken strips -- doesn't present a problem, but maybe there's something more in that processed, pressed and pre-formed meat that doesn't jive with her system. I don't blame her!

So, farewell nuggets! You won't be seeing the like's of my little girl's tastebuds for quite some time!