We never set out to avoid McDonald's. We never set out to raise a child who will not eat a french fry, a Chicken McNugget, not even a Happy Meal. We never thought we'd have a kid who, at five, doesn't even know what a Mc-anything is. But we do, and we have, and she doesn't. This has come about for a variety of reasons. One major reason is that 1/3 of our family unit is vegetarian, and another 1/3 is nearly vegetarian by proxy. So the McValue menu does not offer a lot of choices for us off the bat. For all the "healthy" options they offer now - well, we'd just as soon eat a whole apple than pay $1 to by a vacuum sealed bag of slices of them. We managed to get through the first three years of her life without having to stop at a McDonald's Playland for a travel break, and even when we did on one trip, we brought our own food into the place. We went to a birthday party at McDonald's once, and I actually felt bad and a little embarrassed when I was asked what she would like to eat. It just didn't seem necessary to waste the food, but she did finally gobble up those vacuum sealed apples. Okay, fine, we did watch the documentary Supersize Me, and we probably had a few moments of smug self-righteousness when we realized "Ha! See? We shouldn't be eating this crap anyway!" That same sort of feeling we got when watching the Frontline piece on Walmart - a place we refuse to shop locally, a place where we only darken the door when travelling and we need to find some healthly snacks for the car. And come to think of it, we stopped at one in a tiny town on the way up to Iowa and what did we buy? We bought a large bag of sliced apples. I see a trend here...
Where I'm going with this story here is this - the kid hasn't caught on to the concept of chain restaurants. This is partly because she doesn't go into many fast food restaurants, although we do go to a pretty popular chain sandwich joint quite often. I worried that after going to this place every Friday for the past four years and ordering a cinnamon crunch bagel, and then going to a different location on two other Fridays, where she saw and ordered the extra large cinnamon roll, that she would forever be converted to this most delectable (and more expensive and sugary sweet) breakfast choice. Once we returned to our original location, however, she never gave that glass case another glance, and went right back to the cinnamon crunch bagel. She still talks wistfully about "that one restaurant where they sold cinnamon rolls the size of her head". She once spoke wistfully on this while standing in that very same restaurant chain just a different location. I think of how we could move her to the suburbs and totally blow her mind with the sameness. Blow her little mind.
Wednesday morning she headed to Iowa with her grandmother, while we headed into work for the day. It's an odd feeling knowing that your kid is heading out of town without you, and we were glad to hear updates from them on the way. They drove a few hours and then stopped at a McDonald's for a bathroom break and a snack. When E talked to her dad she told him that she had gotten a box of little cinnamon rolls and a milk and she sounded pretty jazzed about the whole thing. M's first reaction was to think "Oh, great, now she knows there is something that she likes to eat at McDonald's and now she'll want to stop at them all the time." We pass a lot of McDonald's on the road in our travels, and we were thinking of how often the cinnamon roll plea was going to come up. Later that evening, as she described in greater detail how good the rolls were and what a great snack it was, M said to her that he'd really like to go with her to McDonald's sometime and get some with her - try them out. She paused for a moment, and then, not wanting to seem like she wasn't game, finally said okay. "Sure, dad", she said, "if you want to. But it's really a pretty long drive to get there."
