Tag: Feeding Toddlers

Around the Table

by Ashley filed under Uncategorized

Hooper: gets out of his seat a thousand times, won’t try new things, often prefers to be spoonfed, requires a lot of effort (on our part) to finish a meal.
Van: starts trying to climb into his high chair as soon as he sees food being made, feeds himself, often requires seconds, will try anything, puts food in his mouth by the fistfull. 
Sarah: does not require a rag or sponge, thinks the food in her bowl is overrated, loves having babies and toddlers around, hates blueberries.
What’s it like around your table?

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Hooper @ 33 Months

by Ashley filed under Hooper
Growth & Appearance: Your hair has become downright ridiculous. We struggle keeping it out of your eyes. We’re constantly deciding between growing it out so you can put it behind your ears and shaving it completely. We’re leaning toward the latter simply because you have a thousand little baby hairs that have yet to grow and we’re thinking it needs a clean sweep to get the ball rolling.
Your skin is a bit darkened, compliments of warm summer kisses from the sun.
Eating: I let out a big sigh and an exaggerated eye roll every time I come to this category. I am starting to sell myself on the idea, however, that your behavior is more typical toddler and less of a psycho tyrant intentionally trying to starve himself. Not every meal is a struggle, but the ones that are linger around like the stench of sulfur in a natural hot springs. We’ve succumb to doing what works and if others want to judge us for throwing on Curious George to get you to sit still, I’ve got a big middle finger to wave in their direction. Sometimes it’s just a matter of keeping the peace, and all in all, meals have been more peaceful. Dinner is always the hardest. We do a lot of counting to five with threats of five equating to a time out. It works.
You’ve been eating a lot at breakfast as of late. This morning, for example, you ate half a banana (I mix it in your oatmeal because you won’t eat banana by itself), a bowl of oatmeal, half of a greek yogurt, half of a whole wheat eggo, and a glass of milk. And it only took ten minutes.
We no longer make you your own meal for dinner. You eat what we eat and voila, life is easier. And, by golly, turns out you do like a lot of what us big kids are eating. Maybe one day you’ll appreciate the fact your Papa is a good cook.
You hate when food falls on your lap and insist on having one of us clean you up. Dirt, on the other hand, doesn’t bother you.
Sleeping: At one time, you were the champion napper. Nowadays, naps are hit or miss. And to be honest, it was partially our doing. It’s so much nicer to not live life around a nap schedule. You can get through the day without napping and still handle yourself like a normal human being, most of the the time anyway. And putting you to bed a little bit earlier isn’t too shabby either. With that said, some days you do still nap. Other days you simply play quietly in your room with the door closed until you poop your pants and try to get out. And then other days you sleep like a baby and I have to go in and wake you up because napping the entire day away just doesn’t work.
On a typical day, you wake up around 8:30am and go to bed around 8:30 or 9pm.
Every night you play “magic hand”. This is when your Papa is putting you in your jam jams and your hand has yet to pop through the sleeve and we all look mysteriously around for your missing hand. Then you pop it through with the sliest look on your face and yell, “magic hand!”. Every night you think you have the coolest show in town.
Talking: You say everything. You still have quite the lisp with your S’s. And despite having known your colors just a few months ago, now everything is green.
When we’re out and about, sometimes you’ll request to go “back home”.
We can no longer hide the fact you watch a lot of Curious George because all of the sudden you’re talking like George and your vocabulary consists of various “eeeehh” and “aaaahhhh” accompainied by points and cackles. It’s the first time you’ve ever annoyed me.
The other day you were walking backwards in the front yard and walked right into a pile of dirt and said, “shit”. I ignore it every time because I think no attention is better than negative attention. We really need to stop using four letter words around here.
You are very polite and say “shanks” (thanks) often and appropriately.
Development: I love watching how concepts mature. The other day, for example, you told me your toy car was too hot to sit on and you asked me to blow on it to cool it down.
You’re the shy kid on the playground. It takes you a while to venture off on your own and more times than not, you’re right there by my side… or pulling my arm to where you want to go. You’re intrigued by other kids that are playing and every now and again you’ll approach them with a gregarious “hello!” but your nature is definitely cautious and reserved.
You’re scared of a toy fire engine outside of a restaurant we go to. It’s one of those cars you put a fifty cents in and it rocks back and forth with it’s siren blaring. You hate it and refuse to go in it, though you love to ride the boat right next to it.
Sarah is your best bud. You love her. It’s become your daily responsibility to feed her and you love carrying her bowl over to the food closet, filling her bowl one painful quarter filled cup at a time, and leading Sarah over to her bowl to show her you put food in it. The other day you saw Sarah sleeping in her bed and proceeded to close the door to the room, turn off the light, and say “sweet dreams Gonz” (“Gonz” is Sarah’s nickname). You also like grabbing her by her collar and leading her around the house. You shower her with random kisses and hugs throughout the day, ever day. Your love for her is very genuine and sweet.
You insist we kiss your bo-bos. You kiss ours too.
You love babies and you’re very good around them. You like to “pet them” and kiss them and shower them with attention. You’re demeanor, in general (baby or no baby), is sweet and kind. You’ll sacrifice getting your way to make someone else happy… well, some of the time anyway. But the fact you do it at all sure means something. And you love positive reinforcement. You’re the kid that’s looking over his shoulder right after you gave your toy to another kid to see who saw and make sure they acknowledge your kind deed.
You play doctor. The other day you were sitting at the desk in your room with your toy stethoscope around your neck while writing on a piece of paper. Then you’d stand up on your chair to answer the phone and when we asked what you were doing, you said “werkin”. You refer to yourself by the name of your pediatrician often.
You’re all boy. You’re constantly in the tool drawer and love to pretend to fix things. You also like to take the tape measure and go around and pretend to measure things.
We’re fairly certain you are left handed. You definitely write left handed and eat with your left hand. You throw with both, so I guess the jury is still out.
Favorites: Cars, cars, cars. That’s your go to, your every day. You like trucks and tractors and, really, anything that has wheels. The other day I bought you a toy forklift and when we got home, I threw on a youtube video to show you what a forklift was. It was a training module and you watched the whole thing as if it were, well, Curious George. I, on the other hand, wanted to fall asleep because, um hello, forklifts?!
You also like throwing rocks; especially at the house. You also like putting things in the toilet and flushing it. I’ve caught a toy snake and a rubber turtle on the way down. Thanks for that. Pee on my hand is always refreshing. Hash tag: Why you shouldn’t let yellow mellow.

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Hooper Eats.

by Ashley filed under Hooper Eats
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.

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A Nibble Tray Experiment

by Ashley filed under Uncategorized
I feel like all I do when discussing what Hooper eats is complain about what he didn’t eat or how long it took. So I’ve reached out to Sarah (Sarah Dyer, not our dog silly), whom I mentioned before, and suggested that we do a post swap and pay a little visit to one another’s blogs. So, you know, you can hear someone else with a horrible eater complain. Sarah writes about the frustration of feeding her little Stanley in much the same way I write about Hooper. Only when I see her posts of what Mr. Stanley is eating, I’m jealous. He seems to eat pretty well. But I know all to well that it’s all about what happens in between the before and after photo. I’m talking about the struggle people. You can’t photograph the struggle. It’s like taking a picture of someone before running a marathon and after. Yeah, they did it, but can you feel the burn in their legs or the deflation in their lungs. No soiree. So despite my jealousy over what Stanley appears to eat, I have nothing but sympathy for the struggle in between. So with no further adieu, here is the lovely and talented (check out her illustrations) Sarah who bravely did her own nibble tray experiment…
Hello!
My name is Sarah and Ashley suggested I popped over from my blog ‘Sarah Illustrator‘ to say “Hi” and to give my take on the whole feeding a picky little eater. I found such a love for this blog because Ashley writes so honestly and with such humour. There are a lot of blogs out there that have no real substance, but this one definitely isn’t that kind. Anyway I digress. The main reason I’m here is that Ashley and I seem to have bonded in the internet world over our troublesome eaters. I started these posts a while back on my blog but quickly realised I was trying to fool myself (and maybe my readers) with a perfect idea of what my little boy Stanley ate. The real truth was most mealtimes are a battle. If he does want to eat I mainly have to spoon feed him and at almost 21 months I think he should be able to do that himself. He is generally fussy about things and always wants to get down after about 10 seconds of being in his high chair. I then spend the time like Ashley running around the house shovelling more mouthfuls of food in his gob, or letting him play with his cars at the table to distract him into more mouthfuls.
Since starting these more honest food posts I’ve received some great advice. One of the best bits was to look at what he was eating over a whole week not just a day. In recording a before & after shot of his food I’ve also realised his eating has improved and really isn’t that bad. In fact I think I’m beginning to make real progress with him. He is trying more and more things and getting quite adventurous with his tastes. It makes for a happy Mummy to see this. Recently Ashley did a ‘nibble tray experiment‘ and so I decided to do my own. I like the idea behind this feeding attitude and think it makes a lot of sense. I think I will try to do this type of relaxed feeding at lunchtimes, letting Stanley pick at what he fancies and then do a more ‘proper’ meal for his evening dinner.
This is what our nibble tray looked like. I used a paint palette to get the little sections.

I, like Ashley, included things I was pretty sure he liked and a few foods he’s only had occasionally to test him out. He was pretty excited when I put the tray in front of him, and there was no instant request for a toy to play with. Good start I thought. He straight away went for the cashew nuts which is a food I don’t think he’s EVER eaten before….I’d already put money on the egg or cucumber going first. I was soon to find out that these would be the last thing he’d eat. This boy does like to keep me on my toes 😉

I did have to try one of everything on his tray. I don’t mind doing this though. I never put food on his plate I wouldn’t eat, and he is good sharer which I think is important to encourage.

We were doing pretty well. Every now and then I had to ask which one he was going to try next, and he would say “that one” and then go ahead and eat it. If there was a slight lull again then I would ask him again what he fancied next and list the food on his plate. He’s quite a parrot with his speech so he enjoys listening and then saying the word he wants to eat next. “Owive”. This continued well, only a slight distraction in standing up for a bit and a light attempt at escaping over the highchair and onto the table.

Amazingly though he ate it. ALL of it! As you can maybe tell from the photos it did get DARK towards the end of the meal it had taken that long! I should have been clever and done a before and after of our clock like Ashley to show you. We started around 5pm (I tried it for his dinner that day) and he finished just before 6pm! I was happy enough though – I’d been sensible and made a cup of tea to sit down with before we began. In all though for us a major success. No distractions needed other that chatting about his next mouthful. No cars, no TV no silly music and me dancing like a loon. No begging, no pleading, no dashing round the lounge after him.

I’m sure I worry more than is necessary. My mother thinks I’m mad and says he eats very well. Perhaps sometimes just the tedious nature of doing it 3 times a day is what gets me down. He is my first child, I have a few friends to compare myself to, but perhaps like a lot of things with motherhood we all expect the best and then beat ourselves up when we don’t get it right – or it doesn’t quite go how ‘the books’ say it will.
Thanks to Ashley for letting me do a guest post on her beautiful blog. Hopefully I’ll be back here if this incident hasn’t ruined our new friendship!
You can pop over to Sarah’s blog to see my “Honest Food” post. 

Hooper Eats.

by Ashley filed under Uncategorized
The title of this post is debatable, but only if you want to hear me complain about how difficult it is to feed Hooper. Na, me neither. That’s why today I’m going to stick with picture proof and let you draw your own frustrating conclusions. The other day Hooper and I took a little trip over to Ikea to get some shelves for his new room. We grabbed food while we were there and this is what ensued:

 

Here we have proof that a few bites did actually enter the sanctuary known as Hooper’s chompers. That’s macaroni on his face and it’s always a good sign. See, it started well. 

 

Then he ditched the food for the straw wrapper. My hopes are still high, if only I could get that wrapper out of his mouth.

 

Then he started playing with his straw. He loves taking it out of the hole and putting it back in. I know, typical man, right? Get your mind out of the gutter, would you?

 

Ah-Ha! The fork is going in the right direction! Hip hip hoorays are starting to build in my throat.

 

Um, but that’s not a hopeful face. What is he doing? He loves mac n’ cheese.

 

Stall out move. Yes, he often licks his food when he’s unsure whether he wants to eat it. Hope is still bubbling, but impatience is also brewing. Eat Hooper, Eat!
Same bite remains on the fork. He’s thinking about it.

 

But instead, the fork makes a detour and the back end goes in. Hope begins to fizzle. My encouragement is going totally ignored. 

 

“Look Mom, no hands”. Look who thinks he’s so cool now. Yup, it’s the same little booger who won’t eat his god damn food.

 

Oh no he didn’t. Oldest trick in the book and he’s already figured it out at 18 months? The good ol’ hide your carrots in the napkin trick. Come on Hooper, I used to do that. You’re goin’ oldschool on me now.

 

And now the attention is turned to the napkin. He decides to cover his juice with it.

 

Then he eats the napkin. Seriously Hooper, you won’t eat your mac n’ cheese but you’ll eat the napkin. For goodness f’n sakes, you’re toying with me now aren’t you? 

 

He proceeds to rip his napkin into pieces. At this point I’ve given up all hope and am trying to find peace in the fact he is still sitting in his highchair past the usual 5 minutes. 
We leave to find his shelves. The food remains. And there lies cold hard evidence of an impossible child to feed. I have to conclude by saying that Ikea rocks. Hooper may have hardly touched his food, but kids eat free until 4pm, so three bucks stayed in my pocket. Score. Bummer it was wasted anyways.

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