Nobody will ever be good enough to date our daughter. Period.

Most parents feel this way about their children at some point, and while it’s light years away for us, I’m having this kind of anxiety about the food she eats. No banana is organic enough, no cracker unprocessed enough! I know I have to get over it. She’s just so perfect and untainted still, sue me for wanting to keep her that way.

I don’t want her eating partially hydrogenated oils or unsaturated fats, no Mcnuggets, or soda. But how will I explain that she can’t have MickeyD’s when I crave their heavily salted fries and addictive sugary ketchup? Or that I can’t seem to kick my nasty mini-Coca Cola addiction? She’ll hate my hypocritical ass!

While her father and I don’t eat as healthily as we could, I still want better for her. I finally understand that as parents, we want only the best for our kids. He says she’ll be fine if she has a little bit of that stuff, but I want to protect her from getting a taste for it in the first place. That’s what’s wrong with us. I was born with a picky palette and it’s still not as refined as it could be. And don’t even get me started on my sweet tooth. It’s a disease for sure!

Now that her doctor said to feed her bites from our own plates, I’m starting to freak out about our eating habits. I’m not going to give my baby pizza or spicy chicken chili. So does this mean we’ll have to start eating bland mush?

Sometimes I wish we lived on a farm far away from the shelves and aisles of packaged, processed foods. We’d have to prepare everything that went into our bodies. But who am I kidding? I’d miss the convenience of opening a box of Cheerios and not having to milk the cow before eating my morning bowl of cereal. Who has the time for that anyway?