Feed Me

Ladies and Gentlemen, let me introduce The Pincer Grip!

I couldn’t be more proud as Freya picked up peas with her finger and thumb and popped them in last night as part of the vegetable curry I made. Sadly, she has decided that she wants to use this technique to eat rice instead of the spoon. Dinner time seems much longer than normal…

She also had a chocolate chip fairy cake and a tiny bit of chocolate chip cookie. It doesn’t hurt to let them enjoy the same things as you once in a while. It would hardly be fair for us to sit there pigging out on naughties and not let her have a little taste. To be honest she wasn’t that impressed. She preferred her melon slice even if it was covered in curry sauce.

Lunch time saw the usual pita bread with cheese and ham and one with cheese, cumin and carrot. I tend to cut them into strips and give her the ones which look like they will stay together better. She was a very hungry little girl today and nommed on four big strips, demolishing two completely and having a good go at the other two. Of course this meant that mummy only had less than one and a half pita breads for lunch and has had to eat more cakes to make up for it…

Nothing remarkably new this time, but a little trick that we have discovered…

Freya loves her curry, especially the meat, but would not eat the vegetables with the same gusto.  Even her rice was being demolished faster than the ordinarily-loved courgette.  So, I showed Linda how to cheat; I stabbed a chunk of courgette with her fork and then handed it to her.  She grabbed the courgette, ate it as though it were the finest sweet-meat, and looked at me for more.

It is not even like it was the fork, not really.  She was grabbing the food and pulling it off the tines, leaving the fork itself in my hands ready to be re-loaded.  Perhaps the only reason she eats rice, following this logic, is that she gets to eat it from a spoon.

It seem that, as a parent, I think I have come to the rather Zen conclusion that the ‘why’ is not so important as the ‘whether’.  If she eats vegetables and rice, I don’t care what prticular part of the trick works…

Yes, we decided to go with Thai green curry and rice.

As has always been our way, we decided to give Freya whatever we were eating.  In this case, a green Thai chicken curry.  We tried giving it her with a rice-cake, as we were not sure how she would take to normal basmati rice, but then decided to load some sauce-laden rice onto her spoon and see what she did.

We started by giving her the chicken, just to see what would happen.  We tend to eat it fairly spicy, but we have learnt not to assume anything with our daughter.  Instead of spitting it out or crying, she chewed quite thoroughly and happily on the chicken.  I think this may even be the first time she has had chicken, since we worried about the way chicken can fray and crumble.  We needn’t have worried, since both spice and fraying were received with little more than a naughty smile, the one she usually saves for when she has managed to stick her hands (or face) in someone else’s dinner.

The rice came next, on her baby-sized spoon.  We put it to her mouth, since rice is prone to spilling, and she took some.  I think it tends to be slick enough to slide down your throat, so she did not gag or spit.  She was not very excited by it, I don’t think.  She was content to be fed rice, but not to actively feed herself rice; if we wanted her to eat, the chicken was the answer.

We decided to finish with rice-cake, which she licked the sauce from, but was too tired and thirsty to eat it.  She lolled over the edge of her bumbo instead and waited to be lifted free.  She was drooling quite a bit, perhaps due to the spice, and making little or no effort to stand when I held her up.  I ended up holding her while I brushed down her clothes, then watching her sit down heavily right on the pile of dislodged food.

Like most days, this finished with milk and a bath, then more milk and straight to bed.