What's on the menu?

Feeding Kaylani is no easy task. Not even just the feeding part...all aspects of it. We've gotta dance around, sing, rotate through toys or other distractions just to get her to eat. That part we're actually used to by now. The hard part now is picking her food each meal. It's just not easy anymore.

Before, we used to grab any jar (or two) of baby food and give it to her. Vegetable, fruit, meat...all didn't matter as long as we had our distraction toys ready. Nowadays, we're lucky if she finishes one jar of food before she decides she's done with pureed food on a spoon. Now she wants what we're eating, or at the very least, something not pureed. That's the hard part.

All 3 meals are difficult because we have to pick something that she can eat (which is basically anything that doesn't contain nuts, honey, or umm...some other stuff that our doctor told us that I can't remember right now). If I had to pick one, I'd probably say breakfast is the hardest meal. Not on the weekends, but during the week. On the weekends, I'm home and cook breakfast (either waffles or eggs). On the weekdays, Mommy used to just drink a fruit smoothie. Now she's gotta make pancakes, waffles, eggs, or something else that Kaylani can grab and feed herself. Baby (or regular) oatmeal just doesn't cut it.

Lunch is usually out, and that's when we've gotta buy something for ourselves that she'll eat too. Pizza? Sure. Sandiwch? Sure. Something with rice? That works too. But it's not always that easy, and definitely not always that clean. No more soup and salad (which surprisingly, both Mommy and I like to eat for lunch). No more other things that may contain nuts. No more fast food from McDonald's, Wendy's, or Burger King. No more anything that might not be the healthies for Kaylani (including pizza if it's 2 or 3 days in a row).

Dinner's the same way. Now, when Mommy plans out the night, we gotta keep Kaylani in mind. Will she eat steak? Sure, if it's good meat and not too chewy. What can we marinate this chicken in? Nothing that has nuts or honey. How about sweet plaintain? She might not like it. Breakfast for dinner? Great idea, but that takes away from one of our breakfast options. How about no dinner at all? Won't work because Kaylani's gotta munch on something!

It's funny because I really do think it's great that she'll eat whatever we eat. I'm hoping this carries on for the rest of her life because I think it's great not to carry around food just for her. But sometimes, just sometimes, I wish she would eat her food and that's it. Sure would make life a little bit easier now. But no one ever said having a baby was easy. And anyone who does say that, probably doesn't have kids.

Trick, no Treat!

It's been challenging, to say the least, to get Kaylani to eat something other than baby food. In fact, it's been challenging to get her to eat at all. Before, we used to just have to act like a clown or rotate through 4 or 5 toys to get her to eat her food. Now, we have to resort to much dirtier tactics, for a much dirtier job. The only way to get her to eat lately is to flat out trick her.

After Kaylani eats a jar of baby food, we usually only get 1 shot to give her something different without any trickery (unless you count slipping in something different while she still thinks it's the same baby food as trickery). If we give her a different baby food from a jar, she may keep going if we rotate through some toys. But if it's real food, then her mouth locks down tighter than a breastfeeding baby latched on to her mom. And the only way we've found to get her to open up is by pretending to give her something she wants to eat (like Cheerios), or by prying her mouth open with a carjack.

Tonight, Mommy made Kaylani a butternut squash and turkey mix, a butternut squash, turkey, and pastina mix, and a bowl of pastina. We hoped that she would eat one of the three, but turns out the pastina was too hard to chew. That meant we were left with blended butternut squash and turkey. After 1 bite, Kaylani decided she'd had enough. But when we took the Cheerios out, all I had to do was hold up a Cheerio in front of her face to get her to open up. Since she can't feed herself yet, she waited for me to put the Cheerio in her mouth. Instead of Cheerio, she got a spoonful of butternut squash and turkey. Trickery successful!

After about 3 spoonfuls, she got a little bit smarter and started to hold my hand with the spoon. But after I switched hands and fed her with my left hand, she ate about 4 more spoonfuls of food before she lashed out for the Cheerio. Then, after getting an actual Cheerio (which she touched and played with to make sure it was an actual Cheerio), she ate a few more spoonfuls of food instead of the Cheerios that she wanted so badly. 15 spoonfuls in, or roughly 2.5oz of food later, she was all done. She was done being tricked.

It's probably unadvised to trick her to eat actual food, but it's the only way we can get her to eat. Hopefully after a few days of this food, she'll eat it willingly since that's how long it's taken usually. But if tricking her is what gets her to eat, then you might as well just call everyday Halloween. Except in this version of Halloween, there are no treats. Not for Kaylani at least.

Room for Desert?

Growing up I was taught to spell dessert the proper way by remembering that it has 2 S's because you want more of it. That implies that you don't want a desert because it only has 1 S. If you think about it, a desert is kinda like a beach, but only because of the vast amounts of sand. And judging by Kaylani and cousin Zoe's time at the beach yesterday, I'm thinking that the trick to spelling desert or dessert won't necessarily work.

Babies love sand. They love everything about it. Sitting in it, touching it, watching it fall through their fingers, and throwing it. More specifically, babies love eating sand. I'm not entirely sure if they should eat sand, but when we're at the beach, there's really not much you can do about it. When we put a blanket on the grass, Kaylani will stay within her 5'x7' play area since she's deathly afraid of grass. When we put her on the same blanket on the sand, no such luck. She headed straight off the mat, onto the sand, and then it was play time.

Luckily Kaylani's not in love with eating sand. She'll put her hand in her mouth, and she'll eat some sand while she eats her shovel, but it's not like she's purposely eating sand. Cousin Zoe on the other hand, actually eats sand handfulls at a time. And it was actually kinda cute, except when she started eating wet sand/mud out of the bucket. Then after Yea Yea cleaned her face with water right before she fell over into the sand, causing all types of sand to stick to her, she wasn't very happy anymore (but still wanted to eat the sand).

I'm sure we're headed back to the beach at least 1 (or 5) more times this week, so we'll see if Kaylani learns to eat sand like her cousin. If she does, I can't complain since she has learned how to crawl on her knees instead of her army crawl from Zoe. It's great to see Kaylani learning from her cousins, even if it means she learns to eat sand.