Food all around

I thought I'd update all interested and uninterested parties on our food habits these days. First off, Willa and vegetables. After my last post about her refusing everything, I decided to stop offering them. I gave her carrots at lunchtime, but stopped putting the dinner veggies on her plate in the evening.

After about two or three weeks of not pressuring her to eat her vegetables, we had peas for dinner one night. Willa LOVES for us to count her bites. Even if it's a food she likes, she loves when we count along and we'll pick a number like ten or twenty if it's the main course or something. I dished out her food and then as an afterthought, I counted out ten peas onto her plate. I thought she might have fun sorting and counting them and maybe, just maybe, eating them. And... mom success! She ate them, then she asked for several more servings of them and basically just ate peas for her dinner. Hooray! So now, I bring out peas more and more often and about 95% of the time she happily eats them. The only times she refuses is if she really has had them too much in the past few days.

She still won't eat former favorites like green beans, cauliflower, and broccoli, but I happy about the peas. I think in the summertime she'll start on green beans again if we have a chance to pick them from a garden somewhere (probably at my parents' house). I've been able to talk her into that kind of eating before.

I also realized that she loves, loves, loves salad. She probably loves it for the dressing, but she will eat all of the greens in there. So, I give her salad a lot with her lunches and dinners. She loves red bell peppers, so I give her that several times a week, too. The other day, I had put some red peppers and tomatoes in the salad. She was eating and suddenly stopped and said, "Uh? What's that?" She had eaten a tomato thinking it was a pepper! I told her it was a tomato and then she ate several more of them. She won't always eat them, but I was glad that she actually liked it when she didn't know what she was eating.

She also LOVES to eat frozen peas or frozen corn in a little bowl. It is a perfect little snack while I'm making dinner. The lady who came and evaluated her speech way back told me that she did it for her kids. It's strange, but she loves it and sometimes during dinner she'll ask for more. I don't really mind giving them to her because who cares whether she eats her peas frozen or cooked?

So, it seems like my fears of her never eating another vegetable her entire life were unfounded because when I actually add it all up, she is eating a lot of vegetables. I also want to give a shout out to Costco frozen veggies. I've started getting peas and green beans there. They are flash frozen so they're actually fresher than getting them in the produce section, they never go bad in my fridge because I've forgotten about them, I always have them on hand if I want to make something at the last minute, and they are actually pretty darn tasty. I can't tell the difference between the frozen green beans and the fresh ones I used to buy.

I was going to write a little about June's eating, but I realized that this post is already quite long. Here's the short story - things have been better now that I realize that she is independent and opinionated. Usually, if I put a bowl on her high chair and give her a spoon to try feeding herself, then I can usually shovel in some bites with another spoon. Sometimes she refuses food if it's ground up, sometimes she refuses it if it's bite-sized and she wants it ground up, sometimes she wants it full size instead of bite-size so that she has something to grip and gnaw on. Basically, I never know what to do, but if one thing doesn't work I try another instead of assuming that she's not hungry. Yesterday she threw all her ham, carrots (her favorite), and potatoes on the floor and screamed at me. I then went and ground them all up and she ate two big bowels of it. Then, she deigned to eat more ham not ground up, by holding it in her little fist. She also thinks it's great to wake up in the middle of the night and cry for two hours just because she can. Ryan's arm was cramped this morning from holding his pillow over his ears last night! Before you think I'm a terrible mother, this is the third night in a row she's pulled these antics and I won't be fooled by them any longer. She just wants me to cuddle and play with her at 1 am, which I'm not really interested in doing.