I'm getting smarter

Thankfully our son has given up on the peanutbutter toast and banana diet. He started it about the first of November and finally gave it up a couple of weeks ago. If you are considering it, I can’t say I recommend it. He did manage to both gain weight and grow while on it.

For reasons known only to himself, he decided the only things he was going to eat were peanutbutter toast and bananas. He would drink milk and juice to go along with, but not much in the way of other foods. Oh, an occasional Nutra Grain bar and Fruit Loops, but those hardly count as real food.

He went from being this sweet little baby who would eat anything and everything, with a particular fondness for vegetables, to a monster toddler who would spit out everything you put in his mouth. I learned a lot about stubbornness and toddlerhood in the past two months; things I wish I never knew.

However, we seem to be past all that. For now. I am well aware of the fact that it could return and blind-side me on some idle Tuesday.

So he is branching out again. Very slowly and very tentatively.

I find myself buying foods I never dreamed I would ever have in my house. Fish sticks. Banquet chicken nuggets, “not the Tyson brand, thank you very much, I will spit those out.” Nutra Grain bars, which I find to be a little cardboardy, but Liam loves them and at least they aren’t complete garbage. Goldfish crackers. Fruit Loops. Spaghetti-Os. In short, kid food.

He has yet to get wise to the ways in which Mom tries to trick him into eating something he likely doesn’t want. For instance, today for lunch we had green macaroni and cheese. He has recently decided that macaroni and cheese is OK. Today I threw in about ½ a cup of pureed spinach. He’s going to eat his vegetables one way or another. Actually this worked quite well, I tasted a spoon or two. Trust me when I tell you, if you don’t care for vegetables (but we all need to eat them, right?) this was the best. The color was a bit off-putting, but flavor-wise it was macaroni and cheese. Liam certainly fell for it.

I also put cooked, diced carrots in his Spaghetti-Os. That works for him, too. I don’t know how well they are actually disguised, I cannot abide Spaghetti-Os. I bought them out of desperation when we were trying to find something he would eat. Now he seems to like them, in moderation, too many days in a row is not acceptable.

So we are in the process of learning what works and doesn’t work with this new “Mr Independent” Liam. Just about the time we think we have it figured out, everything will change again, but for now we are getting smarter. I thank God that Liam continues to be cute as a bug’s ear and incredibly sweet when asleep. Both of these are very good things as I would have either given him away or smothered him otherwise.