Feeding babies real food is messy and challenging at best. Feeding two babies at once and not losing your mind in the process should be a new Olympic sport.
N has always been lukewarm at best about eating baby food. There was about a month where she was doing fairly well with eating, but I still had to prod her a lot to get her to do it. Now, she's determined that she pretty much hates being fed with a spoon. That isn't horrible per se, but it does make things tricky (and messy), especially when her brother eats best when you feed him (both babies take food out of their mouths immediately after putting it in—you know, to inspect it—but A2 does it the most. Also, he seems to freak out about new textures more than she does.) At one feeding, I was giving N bites of banana, and then mushing up banana on a spoon for A2. And neither one of them has a ton of teeth, so it's not like I can give them anything that requires a lot of chewing.
As a mildly OCD person, the mess of letting two babies feed themselves gives me small panic attacks every day. Yesterday, I fed them little bits of cheese and then we tried some yogurt melts. By the end of it, both babies were pretty much covered in squish and drool. Would I be too anal if I covered them in plastic from head to toe before every meal?
Really, most of my frustration of late is with N. Every day is a constant battle to figure out what I can get her to eat. Will she decide that yogurt is her very best friend again? Will she even get close to finishing her bottles? If I sing to her or try to get her to giggle, will that distract her enough that she'll eat?
I realize that there's no actual point to this post, but it helps me to write it all out. I'm working on not freaking out when she won't eat, and accepting her for who she is. It might help if people didn't think she was some genius six-month-old walking around because she's so tiny.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
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3 comments:
I have daily battles with Z over what he will eat. (if he chose, it would be pizza, tacos, pancakes, frozen Costco orange chicken and honey nut cheerios every single day). Somehow I always thought that once my children were verbal, I could reason with them about their food habits and my concern for their wasting-away-ness with some degree of success. Nope. I wish you luck with N. So long as your ped isn't concerned and she is growing, I imagine s/he won't be. But that doesn't help the worrying mother's heart, does it? I suppose we should face it, the combination of food and children is messy--physically and emotionally. But head to toe plastic doesn't sound all that bad to me.
This is why I think at least once a daily that is would be so much easier for everything if we just got hooked up to some tube and we instantly felt full and satisfied. There would be no cooking, cleaning, and there would be no complaining because we could specify to this magical device that we wanted all our nutrients for the day to taste like chocolate. I think perhaps this will be how I make my millions!
My friend had an extremely picky child who is now 7 and is just fine. :) I remember her saying she used to plan her day around figuring out what she could feed her daughter. I know its frustrating, but I have a firm belief that she will be ok in the end. Eating is biological. She won't starve herself. And you are a great mom for obsessing.
And on the issue of messiness - my best advice is get a dog. I never got too crazed because I knew there was Murphy in the wings, waiting to make the mess disappear ;).
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