An Update.

When Kary left, it all seemed so simple. Everything made sense. We had a plan; rules and suggestions taped to the fridge as daily reminders. And even with those daily reminders, I found myself wanting so bad to be consistent despite the fact I was consistently forgetting what we were supposed to be doing. The reality is that many of us eat three times a day. That’s three solid times a day, for over two years, that we have become comfortable with bad habits. Things like, “I’m going to take your food away because it appears that you are done”, practically shook as they came of my tongue. I felt like a big burly man in a women’s dress: not comfortable.

There was no instant gratification. Not one new strategy implemented brought immediate reward. Entire meals were being skipped left and right. And, once again, tension returned to the table as Willy reverted back to threats of time outs while I pressured him to stick with the plan despite the plans ineffective appearance.

It’s hard to be a parent. And it’s hard to change behavior.

We floated through the three week trial period keeping to the plan as best we could.

After about a month, this is where we’re at:

-We have a mealtime routine. It consists of cleaning the table, washing our hands, setting the table, putting a record on, and then sitting down to eat. The same way that brushing teeth and putting jammies on signals bedtime, this routine signals mealtime. We’ve been good at sticking to this and he understands the concept of mealtime. He also understands that there is no TV until everyone is done eating. We’ve made the mistake of turning on the TV, in hopes he would eat, but have learned that this is ineffective unless we spoon the food into his mouth. Which leads to the next update…

-We no longer spoon feed Hooper. At all. Sure, we slip up at times and encourage him to eat the food on his plate (we’re not supposed to encourage him at all) but our days of loading his spoon and bringing it to his mouth are done. I feel relief with that, like I was carrying giant piles of wood from one location to another location only to have my boss come in and tell me that, in fact, I don’t need to carry shit and that I’m better off sitting on my ass. Now there’s a rule I can abide by. If doing less means doing more, I’m all in.

-Meals are faster. This ties in to the fact that we’re no longer spoon feeding him. Trusting him to feed himself has made meals quicker because, well, he doesn’t eat that much on his own. I’m not sure this is necessarily a good thing, but I’m rolling with it because it follows the same conclusion I came to before: Less is more. I’m trying to remind myself that my job is to provide him with healthy choices and his job is to eat as much or as little of it as he wants. I also have piece of mind knowing I can rely on the snacks that we’ve added.

-We haven’t added a new food to every meal. I knew this would be hard for us to do with each meal, so I mentally committed myself to one new food a day but haven’t been great at even keeping to that. We’ve been told from Kary that toddlers need to see/try a food sometimes 20 times before they try it/ like it. It feels so silly putting things on his plate over and over again that he does not even touch. It’s also hard because my own diet lacks a lot of variety so going to the store and buying different food just to put on Hooper’s plate for “looks” seems silly.

-We’ve resorted to giving him food he likes to make meals easy and to give us the confidence that our new game plan is working. I realize, in writing this, that that confidence may be false but we need an “easy” meal every now and again to keep our sanity. Our goal is to not cook separate meals for Hooper, ever, but more times than not this has equated to the fact that his dinner goes completely untouched. He’ll happily declare his meal as being “done”, bring his full plate of food to the kitchen, and move on to playing with his toys. When this happens, it’s hard to keep to the rule of keeping the snack that follows “snack sized” as we both get anxious about sending him to bed hungry.

-He knows he is at risk for having his plate taken away if he gets up from the table. Sometimes this works great and he runs back to sit back down and eat his food. Other times he’ll happily say he is “done” despite not eating a single bite. It’s been a struggle not to get upset with him when this happens. Keeping our emotions at bay is an ongoing struggle. It can be so frustrating to watch him happily refuse a meal you took the time and energy to make. Add in the worry of him missing a meal, and yeah, it’s all an emotion struggle.

-It’s been frustrating allowing him to refuse to eat food that we know he’s ate before (when we spoon fed him) and liked. We had chicken pesto pasta, for example, and he ate all the pasta but left all the chicken. There’s a handful of meals he “ate” before that he will not now that we’re leaving it up to him. In this sense, it feels like there is even less we can give him that he will eat now that we’re trusting him to feed himself.

-As time passes, I can feel us slipping back into old ways. It will be a continuous challenge to make the rules a habit. I fear we we’ll revert back to doing whatever works for the day to day struggle, losing site of the larger picture.

To be continued…

You can read all posts in the series here.