Lucky me, I don’t have a picky eater.

Yet.

It seems like most kids go through phases when they will only eat white food, or flat food, or exclusively French fries (my nephew would willingly eat little else ages 1-2).

It's clearly not hereditary since I don't know how my parents managed to feed me as a kid – I hate tomato sauce, anything with gravy or white sauce, mushrooms, cooked carrots in any form, and mashed potatoes. And I am less picky now than I was as a child.

While my daughter isn’t that annoying, she's in a phase  right now where she'll ask what I am making for dinner, I'll tell her and she'll announce in her little three-year-old voice, "I don’t like dat." It could be her favorite thing or something she's never had before, doesn’t matter. And then most of the time she'll eat it anyway.

We're big proponents of the whole "we are not running a restaurant" school of dealing, so if she doesn't like something she doesn't have to eat it but I am not making a whole new meal. We also use my parents' tried and true "Try three bites." I could practically separate foods into their component molecules in order to get those three bites, but I would do it and thus will try almost anything today.

This piece from Channel 13 in Central Florida http://www.cfnews13.com/FamilyAndHome/YourKids/2008/1/9/parenting_picky_eaters.html has a few more ideas. The best? It's actually quite common to be choosy — about a  quarter of all families have at least one difficult eater, and contrary to generations of parent's exhortations about starving children in wherever, pickiness is common to every culture.

The good news? It starts in preschool and is usually over by about age seven or so.

Except for me. Sorry, Mom.