I fought the puffs, but the puffs won

Yes, it's true. I gave in to peer pressure. Or rather, I gave in to pressure from Josie's peers.

You see, Chris and I try to emphasize whole foods in our diets and in our daughter's. We feel, whether rightly or wrongly, that foods closest in resemblance to their form when they sprang from the earth or pasture or a reaction between bacteria and milk...well, you get the point...are the best for our health.

Highly processed foods often lack nutrients or are full of chemical preservatives and stabilizers and fats and salts — ingredients that sure enough make 'em taste good and last on our shelf but don't seem to do a lot for us.

Still, Chris and I don't want to be THOSE parents. You know the ones who look down their noses every time you sneak the little one a french fry or a spoonful of soft serve ice cream. Sure, we don't want Josie to turn into a sugar monster or a carbetarian who goes all Guernica at the sight of broccoli. But we don't want her to be the kid looking forlorn and alone with her carrot sticks while her friends eat cake at birthday parties or who refuses Grammy's homemade oatmeal chocolate chip cookies because of parental doctrine.

It's a fine line. One we may have crossed a step or two.

It happened about two months ago. We had heard about them. We passed them in their sleek plastic tubes lined up on the grocery aisle and noted silently to ourselves that they must fit so snugly into diaper bags. (Crafty packaging engineers!) We had seen other parents handing them over to buy a few more precious seconds of silence and their kids gobbling them up like candy. We heard their reverse-of-ominous-and-in-fact-rather-cute name: puffs. But we suspected the evil lurking in those quick-dissolving snacks that come in a variety of innocuous flavors such as banana, blueberry and sweet potato.

"Not our child," we said. "No sir. It's a gateway food, you know." First the puffs, then the Cheetos. And we all know how hard a Cheeto habit is to break.

So, when daycare suggested we send some with Josie so she could give herself a snack in the afternoons, we were appalled.

"Oh no, no," we say. "We don't want Josie to have a lot of processed, artificial foods."

"Not even the organic ones?" one of the teachers asks like no one had ever said no to puffs before. Had no one ever said no to puffs before?

"Um. No. Can we send anything else?" We rack our brains. "Maybe some ripe banana pieces?"

"You can. But, you know, the puffs are easy for babies to pick up and they melt really fast in their mouths so they are less likely to choke," she says. Is she pushing puffs?

"Umm...," we stammer.

"We give all the other kids puffs and Josie looks at them like, 'Where are mine?'" she says, striking at our most vulnerable moment.

I don't even remember if we say anything after that. But we go to work feeling guilty. Guilty that Josie is left out during snack time. Guilty that we aren't like the other parents. Guilty that we feel the peer pressure and are caving a little.

I spend an inexcusable amount of time researching an alternative to puffs. And you know what? I couldn't really find one that I was comfortable with or wasn't some cousin of puffs.

Later, Chris goes to the grocery and, out of a weird sense of atonement, buys the most expensive, organic, low sugar, GREEN VEGETABLE flavored puffs. We send them to daycare. We fret.

At home, we wait for Josie to show signs of puff mania. We look for clues that she'll refuse any non-puffed foods, that she'll go on strike until we hand over more puffs, that she'll grow a third, puff-grabbing arm.

Spoiler alert: None of these things happen. Yep. Girl loves some puffs. I think she can even recognize the tube. But she doesn't get them all the time. And we have started sending ripe banana pieces to daycare to break up the snack monotony. We still buy the organic puffs, but only because they're a little lower in sugar and don't contain as many unpronounceable ingredients.

And because, we realize we are (somewhat) THOSE parents...