Food

Mr. Meh has become quite a picky eater. He likes what he likes and will eat what he wants to eat, not what we want him to eat. His menue currently consists of bananas, yo baby yogurt, cereal with apples and yogurt of milk, cheese, pears, toast and Cheerios.

He refuses to eat meat, sweet potatoes, or any other finger food I tried to give him (such as peas, corn, chick peas, etc..). Yet, he will gladly try what I'm eating, especially if it's cookies, chocolate, or something sweet.... I guess I should start to randomly eat meat like that, maybe he'd come over for a bite.

Cheerios is what gets me. He's crazy about them. And they taste like crap, cardboard crap. There has to be some secret kid-addictive ingredient in them because it's insane how crazy Mr. Meh is for Cheerios. Just like all other kids. A while back, Andy and I had promised ourselves that we wouldn't become the Cheerios ziplock bag-totting parents. Little does he know that over the last few weeks, I've succumbed to it and have started to dutifully carry a ziplock bag of cheerios on my outings with me.

Cheerios have also become a bribing tool to make Mr. Meh sit in his high chair (which we adamantly refuses as of late. He's good for breakast to sit in the chair, but that's it. He won't sit in it for lunch, and especially not for dinner. He also tends to eat most in the morning, becomes more picky for lunch and basically won't eat dinner)

It used to be that he'd eat finger foods, ie anything we could put on his tray and he could eat himself. Or throw on the floor to feed mariposa (which I must say has been a good strategy on his part to befriend her). She on the other hand had profited the most from this by now symbiotic eating arrangement.

But as of Friday, he's no longer into finger foods (unless it's Cheerios or cheese). Now he wants to feed himself -- wield the spoon (create a big mess around himself) and feed himself. Over the last three days he's gotten a lot better. But this is basically my toddler nightmare -- messy eating.

So far he's eaten avocado, yogurt, cereal/yogurt and mashed sweet potatoes. He eats a bit, then pokes his food, the wields the spoon around and in the process manages to get completely messy. It's a two-person cleaning process -- one person for him and the other one for the high chair.

But it's really exicting to see him try to eat by himself. It's a major milestone, and seeing him clumsily wield the spoon with both left and right hand it really makes me realize how difficult and what a fine motor skill eating with a utensil really is.