Is My Toddler an Anorexic?

It's 6 p.m., Milo & Nora are hungry. Milo happily starts eating cheese, beans, pumpkin ravioli, and pizza. As I'm getting Nora into her seat she says "Avocado? Avocado? Avocado please? Avocado in the pink bowl? Avocado?" So I say "Sure, I'll get you some avocado in the pink bowl" and I warm up two cubes of this avocado/banana/yogurt mix that I have ready made for her. I put it into the pink bowl. I set the pink bowl in front of Nora. She digs in with her spoon as I'm putting on her bib and I say "oh hold on, let me get your bib on!" She stops. The bib is on.

And then...."No avocado. All done! No avocado! No pink bowl! All done pink bowl!"

The entire dinner was this way. She never did even taste the avocado, after asking for it non-stop for 5 minutes. I gave her sweet potatoes and chicken. She ate 2 spoonfuls and then stopped. She refused to eat any more. She refused the avocado. But when I gave the sweet potatoes and chicken to Milo, Nora freaked out, yelling "Sweet potatoes! Want sweet potatoes! Want sweet potatoes in green bowl! Want Milo's green bowl!" Okay Nora, you want the sweet potatoes? Okay. Here's the bowl. Here it is. Here's the spoon. Are you happy? "No sweet potatoes! All done! No green bowl! All done green bowl!"

Oh my God seriously Nora? She wouldn't eat a damn thing. 2 bites and that was it, she was going to what, skip dinner entirely? When the kid weighs 19 pounds and hasn't gained anything in the last 3 months? When the kid weighs less than your average 1-year old, and now she's skipping dinner? Aaaaaaaggggghhhhhh!

No cheese. No bread. No avocado. No sweet potatoes. I thought about offering her applesauce, which she loves, or hell, cookies, but then I thought am I really supposed to be teaching her that I'm a short-order cook here, that she can just eat whatever she wants on a whim and refuse what she doesn't happen to desire even though it's what's on the menu for tonight? That she can just dictate her own personal menu every single night even if it's totally different from what I've prepared for her? It's not like I'm asking her to eat liver. Avocado and sweet potatoes and chicken are things that she loves every other night. My strategy is to offer several different things, usually one or two of which is new, and the rest which are staples that I know she likes and will eat. (90% of the time she refuses the new thing, but at least I know there are things on the night's menu that she will eat). But tonight she wouldn't eat anything.

So Nora basically skipped dinner as Milo sat there happily chomping on his beans.

I was so frustrated and angry at this whole insane back-and-forth "WANT IT -- NOOOOO, GET IT AWAY FROM ME -- NOOOOO, WANT IT" craziness that I literally had to leave the room and give myself a time out. Thank goodness for Jake and shared parenting because if I were a single parent and didn't have the option to just let Jake deal with it for 5 minutes, I'm pretty sure I would be doing a lot of yelling. Because I wanted to yell. As it is I still ended up using the word "shit" which of course Milo repeated immediately.

Shit.