It's really funny. My kids appear to be eating less at meals now than they did a few months ago.
Used to, they would eat a plate of food that would feed the average person, portion-wise.
Now, I am lucky if they eat much of anything at all. I don't think it's the food. They even sometimes pick out what it is that they want for dinner or even lunch.
Odder still, it seems to be different for every meal. Each day brings something new.
Yesterday, macaroni and cheese and hot dogs were the way to go. Today, they may toss those beloved hot dogs clear across the floor into the living room.
Then there is Kai. Kai who would like to try new foods, but will cry if you do not include the usual fare along with the new stuff.
He acts as if you are causing him a serious injustice by trying to feed him ham for lunch instead of the usual chicken tenders.
Don't misunderstand him, though. It's not that he doesn't like ham, it's just that he feels that ham is a DINNER food and not suitable for lunchtime devourment.
Now ham is acceptable when served alongside chicken tenders for lunch, according to Kai.
Just don't try and give him ham all by itself for lunch. That really upsets him to no end.
Have you any idea how messy meals can get now a days at my house? Instead of letting us know that they are "All done" (a phrase each of my toddlers knows and understands and can say clearly,) they often choose the easier, much more entertaining method of alerting us.
When they are full, my babies tend to grab handfuls of whatever is left on their trays and toss it well, where-ever.
Sometimes Kian will toss his bits over handed and towards the sofa. He also has a rather nasty habit of wearing much of his meal.
Vivie has a habit of just picking up her pieces and throwing them over her shoulder to land where it may.
At least she is very dainty in her method, keeping her little finger curled and up as if she is taking tea while using her thumb and index finger to very gingerly select and carefully launch her next missile.
Kai will do one of several things with his left-overs. He likes to swipe his tray clean by wiping all of his food into his lap sometimes.
Other times, Kai will carefully and meticulously slide chosen pieces over the front edge of his tray as if you can't possibly see what it is he is doing (he is very smooth!)
Then there is the "I'm done get me out of here NOW" toss that involves a circular tossing motion that results in the most fallout.
In fact, he has managed to pepper his sibling's hair before even though their chairs are kept apart for obvious reasons (pilfering sibling's food is only one of them!)
At first, I thought that there was something wrong with the food I was giving them. Why else would they be tossing it around instead of eating it?
Then, they just stopped eating anything that they weren't feeding themselves by hand. I could no longer feed them from a spoon assembly line style.
This was their way of saying that they weren't babies anymore! After we moved and had a reliable fridge, I no longer faulted the food.
I KNEW nothing icky was sliding by my eagle eye! I had really worried that I might have accidentally given them something that wasn't quite as fresh as it should have been...
We also went through a phase where we thought it was because the babies wanted to eat with tiny plastic utensils instead of their fingers.
As it turns out, the colored spoons and forks ended up getting tossed as much as the food bits!
Then I thought that maybe they were tired of the food that I was giving them. Instead of the ham that they had insisted on eating every dinner for over a month, I tried buying them a bit of turkey breast.
Kai still resents the change to turkey breast. So much so, that he refused to let a morsel pass his lips regardless of how much he seemed to like it at that first dinner.
I tried buying bigger chicken strips and changing to another brand (they had only preferred this one type at first.)
Kian let us know that, "It's dry" which was quickly followed by all three babies looking up at us and coughing as if they were eating sand, and that was the end of that.
I did discover that they adore Smart One's Lasagna Florentine...but only when I am eating it!
They also adore green bean casserole...if it's off of Daddy's plate, served with HIS fork only.
Sillier still, if I don't have Kai's lunch ready for him when I bring him down from his nap, he will run into the dining room to check out his chair, and actually cry and go into hysterics.
Now, I do understand that he is most likely seriously hungry as nap time comes in between snack time and lunch, but he makes me feel as if I am slighting him somehow.
I am trying to find the humor in all of this, but it's really difficult. I know that Kai is barely on the weight chart for his age and size.
Kian is so much bigger than his siblings that everyone thinks that he is older. Vivie is just, well, unusually small.
The doctor says just keep feeding Kai more food when he is finished with his normal portions.
I really can't figure out for the life of me how that's supposed to work if all he is going to do is toss it at one of us when he decides that he is done.
I have even tried the baby buffet. This entails letting them up out of their chairs and replacing their trays, food available for grazing, and seeing if they will stop by for a snack after they get over being "Done" with just sitting there.
I really do not know what to try any more. I even tried giving them jello-it made Kai cry and all Kian and Vivie did was make faces at it when I tried to feed it to them.
Basically, I spend a LOT of time sweeping, swiffer-vac-ing and swiffer-mopping. I do this after EVERY meal.
It's not just the immediate feeding chair area, either. I usually have to do the entire dining room and part of our living room, too.
I even have to watch the hallway to make sure that nothing flies down it, too! I know that they will not let themselves starve (at least according to the doctor and everything that I have read about picky eater toddlers,) but I feel as if there is something more that I could do. I just wish I knew what that was!
If I only knew then what I know now. Sensory disorders are VERY REAL and what this turned out to be.
It's almost the elephant in the room, the thing nobody wants to talk about openly. It ALSO involves Autism trait presentation.
My kids each wear theirs differently, in retrospect. This is what I was seeing, but nobody at the time was talking about this.
Everybody wants to write it off as picky eaters, being a toddler or cutting teeth even. It was NONE of those things, really.
I began to figure it out when they were a tad older. It was when everybody developmentally should have longsince outgrown these trait presentations that I realized it was here to stay and an inherent part of their very being.
Have a toddler with a similar problem? Look into feeding therapy and pull up the nearest occupational therapist who can help by screening for sensory integration disorder and for feeding problems.
There are things that can be done SOONER than later that may save heartache later on in life.
It would only get worse before it got better, too. Our reflux did not help matters, either.
Later, school would tell them to clean their plates, and poor Kaiden, who always took everybody literally and wanted to please, but could not verbalize anything at all save scripted speech, would dutifuly do so, at his own expense.
He would end up forcing himself to eat foods that made him visibly ill to consume. He would inevitably end up vomiting it all back up sooner than later, too.
Save yourselves the heartache, and get feeding therapy. This is really a thing, a covered service under most insurances & Medicaid, AND typically offered at the same places you can get occupational therapy.
Now you know! I truly hope this helps somebody.
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