Where is my Happy Meal?

Before Bianca became sick, I had a big thing about McDonalds. As far as I was concerned my kids were not going to be McDonalds kids and there was no way we would ever queue up like the masses waiting to place a McDonalds order. Absolutely no way! Then Bianca became sick. As far as the doctors were concerned we needed to do whatever as long as she ate and if that meant adding cream to her milk / cereal and using butter instead of margarine on her toast, then so be it. Anything to give her the calories she needed.

During that first month on steroids she developed a craving for chicken nuggets. She would beg me every day to take her to the food court and buy her chicken nuggets and so I finally gave in and we bought her a chicken nugget happy meal from McDonalds. I sometimes wonder what people thought as the steroids made her look quite overweight with these round, puffy cheeks and she still had hair, so to others she must have looked like a greedy little piggy stuffing chicken nuggets into her mouth begging for more when she finished, and I must have looked like a terrible parent for overfeeding my child like this.

But let me tell you, thanks to the steroids she was constantly hungry (and we had steroids for 28 days non-stop). She could quite easily eat a big meal now and then 5 minutes later beg you for food because she is so incredibly hungry and it is not fun at all waking up at 3am in the morning having to prepare a proper meal for your child because the steroids make them so hungry. It was a real shock to the system and quite heartbreaking too. I actually asked our doctor at the time if this was what it was going to be like for 2 years and thankfully there were breaks in between the steroid pulses, otherwise I would have gone mad.

Since then McDonalds came to the rescue many times when we had trouble with her appetite. Some people say that chemo drugs make food taste like cardboard and so just the fact that she was eating was a big deal, regardless of what she was eating.

So to some extend my kids became McDonalds kids, to some extend, because they don't eat the burgers, they don't drink the fizzy drinks. It is always a chicken nugget happy meal with water. That and Subway (or "Sub-ay-eat-fesh" (Subway eat fresh) as Caitlyn would say) and then for Bianca this is always a ham and cheese sub, no lettuce, no tomato, no salt, pepper or any of the sauces, just ham and cheese.

And of course many times when I simply ran out of ideas, ProNutro, because even though it is a breakfast cereal it is at least healthy with vitamins and minerals and protein and things like this.

I must say that more recently Bianca has become much better with her eating. Much less fussy. More willing to eat what we would eat. But up to recently, eating became a bit of a frustration at times and we had to learn to become flexible and go with the flow. Certainly steroids are no help either because it creates cravings and sometimes for things you simply don't have in the pantry like wild boar which she recently wanted after watching Asterix.

But back to the point of this blog entry.

Yesterday I took Caitlyn to the food court as a treat (we don't go there all that often anymore) and I bought her a happy meal which of course came with one of those toys from Ice Age 3 - Manny, the Mammoth. Caitlyn recently saw the movie and she took an instant liking to this toy, except that she calls it "My Happy Meal" (not Manny, not Mammoth, but Happy Meal).

And last night she took the toy to bed with her. Not quite sure why he must be a favourite, he doesn't do all that much except move his head from side to side, and he isn't even cuddle-material, being all hard and plastic, but anyway that's her choice and that was the end of it...

Until 5am this morning when she woke up crying "Where is my Happy Meal? Where is my Happy Meal?" and I had to get up and search in the dark for her "Happy Meal" that must have rolled off the bed sometime during the night. Sigh!

Then when she finally woke up again at around 7am she was sitting in her room playing for a bit and I smiled as I listed to her saying "Hello, what is your name? My name is Happy Meal" obviously she was introducing the Mammoth to some or the other toy in her room.

But I guess she is probably not too wrong, somewhere in a distant past when there were mammoths and they were hunted down, surely they must have been a "happy meal" to some or the other creature.