Leaps and bounds!

If you've read this blog long enough, you are fully aware of my frustrations for my kid's picky eating.  I mean, it's just food.  Nutrition.  Vitamins.  Minerals.  But that's all.  Matthew is one stubborn kid when it comes to eating, and while I was hoping the picky phase wouldn't last long, it has, indeed, gone on well over a year at this point.  Probably closing in on 2.  I have put way too much energy and emotion into this battle with my child.  Somehow I thought I could win.  (side note: at a recent visit with the pediatrician, he informed me that there are 3 fights not worth fighting as a parent to a toddler and eating is one of them.  Wish I could remember the other two.)

Matthew is not only picky, he's stubborn too.  There's just no way you're gonna get him to eat something he doesn't want to.  His main reasons for not wanting to are: he doesn't like the food; he doesn't know what the food is and therefore has deemed it unlikeable; or he's just flat out being weird.  And he's got this gag reflex. OH the gag reflex.  If we do manage to get him to take a bite of something he has deemed poisonous, he does, indeed gag.  Nine times out of ten, this results in projectile vomiting all over the place, at the dinner table (sorry.  gross but true).  This has happened one too many times, and ended probably right around the time I decided I wasn't going to win (though every now and then Daddy decides to give it a go, and you know what? He then has to clean up the puke!).

About the picky eating.  I really really think it's a personality/toddler thing.  Nothing pisses me off more than the judgey mommies who insist that this could have been prevented.  That their precious child would never turn down a spicy black bean and rice dish or a steak and potato dinner, because they introduced him/her to a full array of flavors from early on.  Ha ha ha.  I find this laughable, naive and incredibly annoying.  For those of you who know me and know this blog, you know this is totally and completely 100% false.  I spent the first year and a half doing nothing but trying to get my kid to eat pretty damn perfectly.  I made his baby food.  I offered tons of healthy, delicious, and varied choices to him.  I sought out recipes that would include vegetables, spices, fish, meats, whatever.  I fed him couscous, black beans, lentils, vegetables.  He gobbled them up.  He ate them like it was candy.  Then, when he grew old enough to have an opinion, his opinion was if it's not cheese, bread, yogurt, grapes, crackers or cereal (that's the short list...of course there's more foods, but they're all in the same groupings of those.), well then, be damned, he's not going to eat them.  Meat? No way.  Well, in chicken nugget form, yes he'll eat chicken.  Vegetables?  HAHAHAHAHA.  And who knows how he could have Asian blood in him? He won't touch a bowl of sticky rice with a 10 foot pole. 

ANYWAY.  That is a long, boring, back story to get us to the leaps and bounds part!  (perhaps I should have titled this something else?)

The leaps and bounds.

Last week, he not only ate 3/4 of a bowl of spaghetti (spaghetti!! With a tiny bit of sauce on it!), but he also declared it "Delicious. mmmm mmmm so delicious!".

This week he has tried and eaten:

cinnamon raisin bagel

watermelon

apple slices

Listen.  I don't care if you are thinking "huh? That is SO not impressive!"  I am so pumped by the fact that he (a) tried new foods (not "new", he's been offered them hundreds of times before, just not on "his list" foods;

and (b) ate them.  Didn't vomit.  Chewed them up, swallowed them, asked for more.

THIS, my friends, has been a good week.  It takes so little to please me, doesn't it?