"Our kids have to eat better," my wife says, and I agree without asking for details. I’m not uncaring. I’ve just never seen my kids eat, so any solid food is an improvement.

Like any clever children, they will yell and even beg for food. My two kids can whine like a runaway train with its whistle stuck wide open. Their puling and yammering sonatas are an art form as well as a public disturbance. If you don’t have small children yourself, think of Yoko Ono singing at a funeral and you’ll get a sense of it. Our next door neighbors would disagree, but they have three little kids. I doubt that they hear ours.

After my kids whine for a good minute, I’ll give in and make grilled cheese sandwiches. This minute is interesting in itself, and if Einstein were alive, I’d like to see him measure it. My guess is, it’s really about eight or nine seconds. It’s possible time stops altogether. Modern physics would be different today if scientists studied such things, but researchers are too busy making grilled cheese sandwiches for their own kids.

If my wife and I are eating grilled cheese sandwiches, then all bets are off and the whining starts again. Eating what we’re eating is against some rule that we now accept without question. Paradoxically, the children must eat the same food as one another. Woe be to us if we give one child something different. If one of them imagines that the other is getting a slightly different meal, my wife and I have to pay up immediately with Happy Meals.

Sometimes when my kids sit at the table with the grilled cheese sandwiches, the sandwiches disappear. My wife claims that the children eat them, but I find them later, hard as Legos, strategically placed on the stairs. One false move in the dark, and it’s a trip to the Emergency Room. I’ve learned by trial and error that cheese isn’t as lethal as cheese food, once hardened. I deduce that the latter was invented by a toy manufacturer.

Occasionally, I’ll find a grilled cheese sandwich with what appears to be a bite taken out of it. I suspect this "bite" is ceremonial in origin. Perhaps, such tidbits of food are heaved at the cat, who is mysteriously shy and loathes grilled cheese. The reason for this mysterious behavior is that children don’t understand the concept of nourishment. To them, everything exists in time and space to be moved, sometimes leaving a wet spot.

My kids do have "favorite" foods, but, as I’ve explained to my wife, this is little more than a fetish. My oldest son, Sam, loved French fries when he was a baby. He’d fall asleep on the changing table, his greasy little fist clutching a French fry, a blissful smile creasing his fat cheeks. Days later, in the car or at the dinner table, Sam would suddenly pull French fries out of thin air. We have no idea where he kept them, but the feat was so impressive that we called him The Great Foodini. "So," we’d say at dinner time, "what’s the Great Foodini up to?" and, quick as a flash, he’d whip out a three day old juice box with cat hair stuck to the straw. To this day, I don’t know how he did it. Like idiots, my wife and I would take apart his high chair and hose it down, hoping to fool the Great Foodini. We might as well have bayed at a full moon.

I know what you’re thinking. Of course, I’ve tried something other than grilled cheese sandwiches. The simple truth is that a grilled cheese sandwich doesn’t leave a trail. Other foodstuffs – (though I’ve never seen my children eat them) do, but have their own pitfalls. Crackers, for example, are impossible to remove completely from furniture and floor crevices. I haven’t aggressively pursued cleaning the crumbs out of all the cracks in the floor, because I read that the R value of ground Cheez-Its is around 40. It’s one of the few cases where the children have actually saved us money, and the orange color blends nicely with the pine flooring.

Other favorites are canned spaghetti products. These come in a variety of shapes and sizes, all swimming in a red sauce that hardens like epoxy when it dries. I’m sure NASA would be interested in this fact. I’ll bet dried Spaghettios pasted on the nose of the space shuttle would more than protect the crew from re-entry burnup.

Pizza is first blown cool — or, more accurately, spit on — and draped across chair backs or dipped in juice. From there, it disintegrates into its components. The pepperoni inevitably ends up on the rug or the bottom of my foot. The cheese disappears completely, becoming fat vapor that congeals in the childrens’ hair. The sauce dries, gluing bits of crust onto the floor, table legs, and anything else that isn’t plate.

Faced with the sheer volume of food splattered, pasted, and ground everywhere it’s no wonder that I’m not surprised when my wife says that the children need to eat better. I have concluded in the last five years that any food that’s in their system arrived there by accident, much the same way a bug gets caught in the teeth of a speeding motorcyclist.

The curious matter of their size remains. No matter how much food we throw at them and miss, our children get bigger. I haven’t figured this out, and my wife and I usually don’t talk about it. I shudder to think at what size they’d be if they actually ate. This, I wonder, is what might have finally happened to the dinosaurs. Maybe their offspring really ate, and they became too large for the Earth to sustain.

Inspecting the floors of the house and seeing all the crumbs, dried popsicle stains, curled up grilled cheese sandwiches, cereal fragments, and fuzzy ex-fruits, I’ve come to the conclusion that most fathers eventually arrive at. We need a dog.