Hard Parental Lessons

I am now feeling Jana's pain with discipline at the table. Grayson is our graze eater. He never really eats a whole meal he just prefers to snack through the day or eat a bite of a meal every thirty minutes or so. He will work on a bowl of oatmeal from 8:00 am till we eat lunch. So needless to say it make me very frustrated at times when he doesn't eat well at a meal and thirty minutes later he is hungry again. So last night we decided that he was going to finish a meal which consisted of 20 pinto beans and two table spoons of hamburger helper. I made his portions small so that it would be an easy task. "riiiight!" Bryan and I decided, in code talk plus some spelling, after dinner we were going to go swimming. At this point Grayson was driving his beans around instead of eating them and he was seperating the rice and meat in the hamburger helper and asking for chips to eat instead of his food. So we made him the "deal" if he ate his dinner we would go swimming but if he didn't finish it he could not go. Good motivator right? Not so much...he cried and fussed about wanting to go to the pool and would not finish his dinner. So his daddy set a timer for him to give him a certain time amount to finish his food and he refused to finish his dinner. So needless to say, to follow through with what we said, Sarah and Mommy went to the pool while Daddy and Grayson stayed home. I pray that Grayson learned his lesson and that Mommy and Daddy mean what they said. But boy that was a hard punishment to carry out because he was so heart broken over the situation. * We don't believe that our children have to "clean their plates" but we do expect them to eat what we give them...if they eat a little bit but are asking for something else to eat instead of what they have been served then we know they are not full and can eat more of what is on their plate, most of the time they are just being picky and we don't want to raise picky eaters if they refuse to eat what .