More Money Making

Here's another thing parents-to-be should be aware of: there's a direct correlation between how much kids love a TV show and how intensely, mind-torturingly irritating it is.

Kids LOVE the teletubbies.

Some day in the not-distant-enough future, the most popular kids' show will probably just be colors brightly flashing at random to the sound of nails scraping their way down a chalkboard. It's the direction we're heading.

Anyway. My kids love Dora the Explorer, which isn't usually too irritating. Dora's actually a pretty good role model for kids. She's got a normal kid's body, she's bilingual, and she gets things done without bugging her parents about it.

There's one annoying moment toward the end of every Dora show, though. "We had a great adventure today!" We, Dora? We had a great adventure?

What I did today: wash the dishes, scrub the counters, work a full shift at my dead-end job, cook, change dirty diapers, make futile attempts to make math stick in my brain.

What you did: earn more in a single 24-hour span than I will in an entire lifetime, despite being a fictional 8-year-old.

Don't even think of asking me which part of the adventure was my favorite.

But readers! You don't have to end up resentful that brightly-colored cartoon characters are out-earning you and rubbing it in to boot! You can steal one of my fantastic money-making ideas and be rich. Then you can hang out with Dora and the two of you can mock me together.

Which brings me to:

Awesome Money-Making Ideas, Part 2
My second awesome idea is deceptively simple - a cookbook with recipes for kids.

I know, you think it's been done before. But it hasn't been done like this.

But first, some background for my unchilded readers:
You see, dear readers, before you have children, you think of eating as something that humans naturally do to stay alive. We each have some foods we like more and some we like less, but really, food is food.

But to a child, there are two vastly different categories of food. The first, Good Food, includes things like marshmellows and hot dogs and apple juice and cookies - you know, real food that people really enjoy eating.

The second, Not Really Food, is full of things that your parents try to tell you are actual nutritious food items, but that are actually disgusting and unhealthy and all of the bad things ever.

Kids know something is Not Really Food if:
1. They don't like it the first time they try it.
2. Their parents seem even remotely enthusiastic about it.
3. Any friend or older sibling or TV show character ever indicates, even once, that it is "icky."

Astute readers may notice that the last criteria is likely to have a bigger impact as your family grows. All you need is for three kids to each decide that two foods are "icky" and there go about a third of your recipes. And if even one of them has a friend who's a picky eater, there go the rest.

I'm starting to think that's how people can afford groceries for 10 or 12 kids. At that point, they must all be living off of flour and water.

And now back to my winning idea:

A truly kid-friendly cookbook. This wouldn't be another "try baking spinach into brownies!" or "what if you fried the chicken? maybe then they'd eat it? PLEASE JUST EAT SOMETHING" cookbook. This would be a cookbook with recipes kids made themselves.

For example, my kids made a delicious cake the other day, with peanut butter, ketchup, and - actually I think that was it. There was definitely no spinach.

That could go in the book. Along with all kinds of other food combinations that no sane adult would ever have thought to try, but would be willing to chance for even a 5% chance of not hearing "It's iiiiiiicky, I told you I don't liiiiiiiiike this," at dinner.