I cut it off after 5 seconds to spare the reader's eardrums. Imagine, if you will, trying to eat dinner through that noise. Imagine it going on for 10, 15, 20 minutes. Imagine a toddler who cannot really reason yet, who responds to everything with "Mommy pick you up", saying it over and over and over again, crying his heart out because it is dinner time and we all must sit in our seats at dinner time.
I am not going to hold Milo through dinner. There are rules. When it is dinner time, we sit in our seats. We eat food like civilized human beings. We do not throw it, we do not get to eat dinner in Mommy's lap, we do not get to eat while running through the house. You have to sit in your seat for dinner, end of story.
The underweight thing that has plagued us since Nora was 6 months old has really set up some bad habits in this house. And by bad habits, I mean my own. I mean doing things like searching high and low to find foods they'll eat, cajoling the kids to eat their food, tolerating behaviors I wouldn't have otherwise tolerated because my bottom line has always been, we need to get calories in them. Nothing else matters as much as that. They have to grow properly. I can still picture us sitting in the GI doctor's office listening to him tell me that if Nora doesn't get enough calories and grow properly, it could harm her brain development.
So faced with that, and the resulting nightmares I started having, how we got them to eat was less important than just getting them to eat, period.
But, you know what? Now they're 2. And Nora's brain seems to be just fine, as far as I can tell. And I do not want to raise a couple of picky eaters. And here we are: Nora will eat bread products and fruit, but she will not eat any meat, pasta, rice, or vegetables. I mean nothing. No mac and cheese. No chicken. No potatoes, for crying out loud. The kid won't even eat french toast anymore, a previous favorite. No waffles, no pancakes, no eggs. So I keep giving her jars of pureed meats and vegetables because otherwise she would not be getting any meat or vegetables.
But I know that I am breaking all sorts of rules and I am teaching Nora how to be a picky eater. And the cajoling to eat stuff has rubbed off on how we treat Milo, too, and the next thing you know dinner is a stressful hellish affair and clearly Milo has picked up on that stress.
I know that what I should be doing is giving the kids what we eat for dinner. Give them 2 or 3 things on their plates, one that I know they'll eat, and then that's it. Nothing else. No negotiating. I can't control whether they'll eat it, or how much. That's not my job. That's their job. But I can control what I offer, and when and where they eat. Taking this route requires being okay with a kid going hungry if she doesn't want to eat what's for dinner. The kid will learn, after a while. The kid will learn that she doesn't get special meals made to her specifications, and she'll learn to not be so picky. (That's the theory). This is the tactic I should be using. I haven't used it yet because I am afraid. I am afraid of them going hungry, I am afraid of them not growing enough, I am afraid of getting in trouble with the doctor, I am afraid of them ending up freakishly short adults or something.
Over the past few months I have mostly lightened up on trying to force them to eat stuff. If they don't, I let it go. That was step 1. And yes, sometimes that means one kid ended up not really eating at a given meal. But it doesn't seem to have really hurt them. Step 2 is to stop pre-arranging about 6 or 7 different items on the menu every single mealtime (in chronological order from least desirable to most desirable in their eyes) to more or less ensure that they'll at least eat pretty well even if I don't actively try to make it so. I need to stop doing that, because it's contributing to the pickyness. And step 3 is to go whole hog. Stop with the baby foods, start with just offering what we eat, with one item I know they'll like each time, and if they don't like the meal, then tough. You can eat at the next meal.
I'm not ready for step 3 yet, but my goal is to get there by this summer. At 2.5 I have to take Nora in for another weigh-in, and at that time if her weight is okay I'll talk to her doctor and get the okay to move ahead with that plan. We need to make mealtime much less dramatic and less of a power struggle. Because a person can only listen to crazy stressed out nonstop crying through dinner for so many nights in a row. It ruins the gustatory experience.
Pictured here is Nora eating, you guessed it, bread.
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