Ella the picky eater

Princess Ella refuses to eat anything crunchy or hard. We have tried 4 different varieties of dog food. She doesn't like rawhide, milk bones, or marrow bones. She will only eat her current dog food if it is mixed with warm water and allowed to soften into a soupy consistency. My dog eats organic food. Do I eat organic food? No, because it's too expensive. Only the best for Ella, though... sigh. I must admit, feeding Ella can be very frustrating! She turns her little doggy nose up at almost everything I try to feed her, which is very rare for a Beagle. Most Beagles will eat anything they can fit into their mouth. Not Ella. Because Ella is such a picky eater, I chose Marc Brown's D.W. the Picky Eater for last night's story time. I absolutely love Brown's stories about Arthur the aardvark and his family, and this one didn't disappoint. Brown's illustrations are sooo cute and his stories are always funny. In this book, Arthur's little sister D.W. is a fussy eater. She won't eat anything with eyes. She would never eat liver in a million years, and she won't touch any vegetables. More than anything else in the world, D.W. hates spinach. Because D.W. creates such a scene when dining out with her family, she has to stay home with a babysitter whenever her family goes out to eat. D.W. decides that staying home while everyone else goes out is boring, so she promises to be a good girl at her grandma's special birthday dinner. At the restaurant, D.W. orders pot pie and discovers that she actually loves this unfamiliar dish. When her mom asks for the recipe, D.W. is shocked to learn that spinach is one of the main ingredients! D.W. learns just how much she has been missing with her picky eating habits, and vows to try all kinds of different foods in the future. I hope that Ella will take a hint from this story and learn to give different foods a chance. Who knows what she might be missing out on by refusing to eat cheaper dog food from Wal-Mart?