The history of food in our family is a long and ridiculous one involving legitimate detours for gluten free food and ridiculous u-turns because the cheese on the chips and cheese was cheddar, tillamook medium cheddar, but it had been cooked 10 seconds too long and had bubbles in it.

In other words, our children are picky eaters, and John and I chose to cater to it. Yes, we are short-order cooks. There are reasons we ended up here—perhaps we felt guilty about having to deny our children so much gluten food and made up for it by giving them constant choice for all meals; David was underweight even eating g-f, and we were desperate to get any food into him; we are philosophically opposed to forcing someone to eat a food they don't like, so we swung too far in the autonomy direction.

We were obviously making a choice to live this way, but it did make restaurant eating mighty difficult. We warned the kids that though the Disney cruise and Disney World had gluten free food, it would not be the same as eating at home. Nobody complained about the rich brownies, the chocolate covered Mickey shaped ice cream bars, but we had some major disasters.

I want to back track that it wasn't just the food. The places weren't quite set up for the g-f kids for the first few meals, so their food came much later than everyone else. By the time it arrived, they were out of control hungry and not able to go with the flow. As if they would anyway.

One meal Rose waited 45 minutes for her pizza only to discover she didn't like it and burst into tears. John and I insisted she eat it or not eat. I'm not sure we had ever had to draw that line.

Then there was the meal where Rose said her hot dog was so/so. Fine we said, we are at an amusement park, all the food is so/so. Eat for energy. After the first few days, the meals sorted themselves out. Rose had pasta with parmesan or hot dog with g-f bun. David had pizza. They both had fries constantly. (Can I once again commend Disney for having all this kid friendly g-f food available at the fast food restaurants as well as the sit down places. Their cooks were knowledgeable and trustworthy.) We survived, but we started worrying about Rose at overnight camp.

Nothing like a little crisis to promote change.

John and I decided to start having family dinner. What's on the table is what you get. We didn't make a big announcement about it. We weren't ready to commit to every night. You have to understand we were getting something out of the old system too; it's just not fair to offer the kids curried chicken and greens out of the blue. We were going to have to change our eating. Not every night, but it was going to start.

So, Sunday night John served pork, rice, broccoli, salad, chutney, applesauce, and carrots. I ate it all. John ate it all. Rose ate pork, rice, a little applesauce, a little broccoli, carrots. David ate rice, applesauce, and carrots. No one freaked out. No one commented. Rose balked for a second, but I think she knew, the change had come. John had also carefully chosen a meal where she had independently tried all the parts before and the spice for the grown-ups was on the side. We have since all eaten pasta on Tuesday (though the kids had g-f plain and the grown-ups had linguini with clam sauce), and last night we had steak. David had a nutella sandwich, but Rose had just what the grown-ups had and a lot of it.

Some people have suggested we just do all family meals every meal, but this slow change seems to be working for us.