The colour of a plate

I have borrowed this book from a dear friend who recently had to experience me rather losing it with Annika. It's great, actually (the book). I had heard of it, because I'm on mumsnet quite a bit and it's often recommended. The authors begin by making some points that should be obvious, really: children are people, and are likely to respond to situations the way people usually do. In particular, if there is a problem, it's best to offer some empathy, instead of a response that tells them not to feel what they are feeling, trivialises what they are going through, or belittles them. Fair enough. I am trying it, with some excellent results. 
   But it does put me in some awkward positions. Sitting in the forest having a picnic, Annika panicked when a curious dog ran up at full speed. Instead of saying, oh, don't be scared, it's just a little dog, I said something like: oh yes, that can be scary. Cue dog's owner huffing, offended: "she's not scary!". Well, I wasn't going to impress the dog owners of Hampstead anyway. 
   Yesterday at dinner ... let's just say Annika is not a fan of eating. It'll probably be great for her in many ways if she's always like this, but it must be hard for her because the rest of us quite like eating, and food generally, and Amps and I are quite happy cooking food, talking about food, planning more food, and trying out London's plethora of restaurants. We were going to do this yesterday, so we fed the girls some leftovers; it was a rather sparse dinner of plain rice, a tiny bit of broccoli soup, and various bits like carrots, cheddar, etc. I carefully checked with Annika - would this be ok? Yes. I got the soup, heated, in a ramekin. "NOOOOOOO!!!, NOT LIKE THAT!!" ... "But you said it would be ok". --"I want it like THIS:" (motions with two hands, fingers together, all pointing down). "Oh. Ok. You want it on one plate, but separate?" --(crying) "Yeah, uh-huh, yeah". 
  So I got out a plate, got the rice and the (rather thick) soup, got it warmed up, put it down: Annika bursts into tears. Full on crying -- this plate had flowers on it. 
   Deep breath. Don't shout at the toddler.  Don't walk out of the room, leaving the other frustrated parent to handle this (sure to escalate). Don't trivialise; empathise. 
   "Ooooohhhhh", I said. "You wanted another plate". --"Yeah!!" (sniffle sniffle whine whine). "That's really annoying!", I said. "You wanted the Mr Happy plate!". --"YEAH!!" (whine whine). (repeat, x3, with variations). "That plate shouldn't be in the dishwasher!", I said. --"Get it out! Get it out for me!" ... --"Well, we'll wash it. That's what we'll do. And then you can have it next time". --(quiet whining, sniffling, terrible sadness)... "...yeah". "You tell me when you're ready; if you have this food from this plate, then when you're finished you can have a cookie" (bribery). 
   Eventually the food and the cookie were eaten. I don't claim this is a perfect implementation of the strategies in the book. But the fact is, I have reached a point where I regularly need to pretend that it is in some way reasonable to give a rat's ass about whether you have the blue fork that matches the blue bowl, the plastic yellow fork that goes with the blue spoon and bowl, whether the plate on which you're going to eat your miserly dinner of 3 challenging tablespoons of soup and some plain white rice has the audacity to have flowers on it, of all things. However insane this is, it is sane to her.