Food for thought

Dash seems to be having a growth spurt. Which is very annoying. Because even though he's always hungry for more, the only more he's hungry for is the same more as always. Somehow, I've made peace with him having a sandwich for lunch and another for dinner, but when he then demands a third sandwich mid-afternoon or for his after-dinner snack, I see a missed opportunity as it skids by me and lands in the peanut-butter, and get all enraged about it.

He's been dutifully tasting things, and getting stars on his chart, though when he got to a dollar he said in a relieved manner "Phew! I've finished!" and was not so happy to hear that I expected this to go on ad infinitum. Money isn't really very meaningful to him yet, so perhaps it's not a great incentive. We need to go to Target and pick something he wants to work towards, I suppose.

But I'm getting frustrated. I know it takes up to 15 tastes before a kid might like something, and that licks and spitting things out still count towards getting familiar with a food, but when he licks a carrot, again, and wants it to count as his "taste" for the day, or gingerly touches his tongue to a cut piece of sausage and annouces "yuck", or spits out a mouthful of applesauce, for heaven's sake, and says it feels dry in his mouth, well, it's a little wearing on the spirits, you know. He's starting to act as if it's our duty to come up with new and desirable things for him to taste every day, as if we should say "Hey, I know, why don't you try this caramel-flavoured ice-cream for today's thing" and then give him a big round of applause for his great effort.

And then I read something like this and get all discouraged because we are so far from having either child eat what the adults eat that it's not funny. Unless the adults are eating sausages and plain pasta, or pizza, in which case Mabel will happily play along.

But then. If I list the things Dash has tasted (/licked, spat out, whatever, sigh) in the past two weeks, compared to all the nothing new ever he would even consider looking at before then, I should be impressed, and keep on plugging away. So I will. Carrot (raw, steamed, roasted), cheese, applesauce, baby spinach leaf, sausage, banana, tinned peach, a new type of cracker, cauliflower, pasta.

See? That's pretty impressive. Except that he has yet to meet anything he likes. Even tinned peach. Come on, who doesn't like tinned peaches? And he thinks that having tasted something once should give him the benefits of its nutrients for life. I try to explain that he has to keep eating them, and more than just a micro-bite, and that the food you eat doesn't have to be your favourite thing all the time, it just has to be okay, and you eat it because you're hungry. Damn, that sounds depressing. No wonder he sticks to what he likes best.

And he's started making his own sandwiches, so really, what am I complaining about? Gah.