Feeding Children

Feeding children is the pits.

Some children apparently enjoy food. When my eldest was a baby, I was smug in the knowledge that I was following Ellyn Satter and was doing everything right and therefore I would raise Good Eaters. 


A Good Eater eats the food you feed them. They try a new food 60 times until they like it, and you cook what you like and just make sure there’s some bread they like on the table and not worry about what and how much they eat.


This worked well for about 4 years. And then my eldest became Picky.


Picky is a horror film of parenthood. I don’t think I understood what it truly meant. 


It means slaving away at meal planning and spending a small fortune on ingredients and then slaving away on actually cooking and even baking your own bread and then your children saying you’re the worst cook ever and refusing to eat the food and just wanting to eat store-bought disgusting gluten free bread with butter. And you die a little inside every day.


I remember having a Picky niece who would order oreo pancakes at breakfast and only eat the oreos. I remember her parents always ordering Mac n Cheese at restaurants and how I was certain I would never do that.


As it turns out I don’t do that, but it isn’t because I don’t want to. One kid won’t touch it, and both kids are gluten free so it’s a bit tricky to find some they can eat at a restaurant.


They are also supposed to be dairy free, but I have given up on that. They consume as much cheese as they want. They need the calories.


I’m hesitant to get into the details of my children’s diets because it is such a fraught topic. The short version is that we dealt with Stubborn Constipation for a very long time and the result was years of dietary restrictions as I tried to find the Root Cause.


What is the root cause of anything anyway? Nature and nurture and maybe something they picked up in Mexico when they were little. Trial and error and tears.


And apparently Nana (AKA Mother in law) is a better cook than I am. From the mouths of babes.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It is night and I am mother

What a depressing scene is the platform formerly known as Twitter. I went on there to try to become involved in politics again, maybe get a sense for where things are and where they are going and I wished I had that t-shirt of Homer Simpson backing into the bushes. There was a video of Elon Musk talking about immigration. He is cringe. Things here are going. On the weekend we went to see The Minecraft Movie and that was a delight. I love Jack Black. There was a strange phenomenon where prepubescent boys sitting behind us in the audience cheered and shouted whenever certain things happened - a portal opened, the crafting table appeared. I think maybe it is a Tiktok trend. The next day I enjoyed two French films at the final weekend of the French Film Festival, Le Fil and N'avoue Jamais. Le Fil was phenomenal. I was on the edge of my seat, until I just read a scathing review of it and now I feel like it was lacklustre and predictable and a bit exploitative. I am but a humble mum and ...
Read more

it was effing PANDAS

 For several years, we have been struggling at our house. I haven't really let on because I just couldn't explain it. Something wasn't right, but no explanation fit.  My beautiful boy was not thriving. Physically he was not putting on weight or growing, and his mental health was deteriorating. We ended up with an ASD3 diagnosis at the age of 8 despite no early childhood concerns. His psychologist at the time suggested it might help the school have more compassion for the inexplicable and unpredictable behavioural challenges he started to have in his second year of school.  And I had my own reasons for pursuing this, too - NDIS funding, to pay for the sessions I wanted to have with the only clinic I could find that would look at DNA, microbiome, and other things to try to address root causes. I was on a mission for that root cause.  But we worked with these practitioners for literally years, and despite following the indications based on his microbiome and his DNA and...
Read more