Meh has wisely decided to visually document a few of the lovely meals we've offered to Zachary -- if he isn't always going to eat all of the variety of selections we present to him, at least we'll have pictures of our efforts. Granted, every once in a while he'll surprise us and get past stage 1 below with a new cuisine:
- (Frequent) Pick it up and reach as far toward us as he can, trying to get us to eat it.
- Bring it toward his face, inspect it, and then put it back down.
- Touch it to his lips, then put it back down.
- Put it (gasp) into his mouth, then sit there frozen, evaluating the flavor, then spit it back out.
- (Rarely) After #4, start vacuuming down the rest of the food item on his plate.
- (Once in a blue moon) The next time we serve a food that reaches stage 5, he remembers he likes it and eats it again. Otherwise, it's back to stage 1.
Last week, plums reached stage 5 (but not 6). The other day, cucumber reached stage 4. And as seen here, our lovely heirloom tomatoes are stuck at stage 1. This is the excitement that is our dining adventures. In the meantime, we'll keep following the advice of most child nutrition books - it's our responsibility to offer him a variety of healthy foods, and it's his to actually eat them. Worst case, I help Zachary finish off particularly yummy-looking things that don't appeal to our young food critic.
3 comments:
They say you have to offer a food 14 times before a kid will just normally eat it. Keep trying!
Oh yes, we used to count the offerings on the fridge with hashmarks; we're way past 14, but still offering!
Well, it's good to know Jakub's not the only one! And J and Z have pretty much the same sequence of stages. But he did eat 10 grape tomatoes yesterday (and learned that if you squeeze them really hard, they'll squirt seeds ALL OVER the dining area).
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