Both of my daughters are extremely, extremely picky eaters. The Lone Star Girl happily chowed down on the diverse and wholesome vegetable-laden fair that I provided to her until she was about three, but then did an abrupt about face, wanting only her protein foods and junk food. It's been that way ever since. I blame her father. I thought about never allowing her to see him eat, but decided that the benefits of having a father outweighed the potential dangers of his dietary influence. Most days I still think so, sort of, especially when I'm paying bills.
Except for nursing, the Lone Star Baby never really wanted to eat much as a baby and that has never changed. Although it turns out, after many tests, that she is just fine, the doctors always worried about her low weight when she was younger, so I never bothered with the healthy, diverse diet that the Lone Star Girl ate during her baby and toddler years - I just fed the Lone Star Baby chocolate and french fries and anything high in fat and calories as soon as she could manage it, as instructed, but she stayed tiny anyways - it's just the way she is.
While I have made some peace with the fact that the Lone Star Baby's version of eating dinner is to eat two or three bites and ask to be excused (she is more of a breakfast eater), I cannot handle the way she then cries at bedtime that she is hungry. I know that popular wisdom says that if they don't eat at dinner, they don't eat and that they won't starve themselves and that they'll learn to eat when they should and blah, blah, blah...but popular wisdom has not met the persistent spirit that is my youngest. And she's so skinny.
So. I have instituted a new routine in our house.
After dinner and bath and the obligatory rounds of Sleeping Queens, but before stories and bed, the Lone Star Baby gets to sit at the kitchen table and eat some graham crackers and milk. She likes this and to me - it's a beautiful thing.
2 comments:
I don't think I ever ate much dinner, but always got a bowl of cereal before bed time. Otherwise there was much insanity of starvation in the middle of the night. Of course I'm not much of a breakfast eater either (I don't like to eat for about 2-4 hours after waking up). I think we all just run a little different and sounds like she's not over-eating by any means.
Ugh...feeding kids, so exhausting and rarely rewarding (but occassionally they come out with an unexpected, "I love this!" or "I can't wait until you make this again!")...graham crackers and milk before bed sounds good to me (another favorite snack when I was a kid was bananas cut up in a bowl of milk with brown sugar).
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