Of course my daughter had other ideas. She’s never been fussy about what food she will eat, in fact I have yet to find anything she doesn’t like. However, over the past 8 months, since she first started on food, she’s been through the following phases, some of them more than once: completing refusing any food from a spoon, completely refusing to put any food in her own mouth, absolute determination to feed herself using only a spoon and not her hands, tipping everything off her plate/bowl onto the table and then eating it, only eating food that came from my plate, throwing everything but one piece of food onto the floor and then eating that. There’s probably some more than I’ve forgotten, too!
In hindsight, again, I can see that each of these was part of her development, both her learning to eat but also exploring the world around her and the effect her actions had on it. Playing with food was and is an important part of the experience for her. At the time, though, some of them made me very anxious. Particularly the times when her new ‘rule’ meant she just didn’t eat very much at all. Or the stages when she was younger and couldn’t understand why what she was doing was annoying or non-ideal for me (the throwing phases in particular!).
I’ve found that now she’s a toddler, I can make some rules that make me feel vaguely in control, for example if she throws a piece of food away three times, I remove it from the table. She’s also now able to eat some foods with a spoon herself, so that phase is now easier to handle too! When she was smaller, it also helped me to have a group of friends who all told me that their little ones had been through similar things, as well as reminding me that until she was one, any food she didn’t eat because she was too busy throwing it around or refusing to acknowledge it on a spoon, was supplemented by her milk feeds.
Once she turned one and started having cows milk, I did spend a few weeks anxiously fretting about her getting the right balance of food groups and nutrients. The best thing I learnt during this phase of worry was to remember that one day is just one day in the grand scheme of her life; as long as in general she eats a well-balanced and healthy diet, it’s not the end of the world if one day she decides she will only tolerate cheese. The next day she’ll probably eat 14 carrots and throw the cheese away, it all balances out in the end.
So, that’s where we are now, Megan loves food and I’ve learnt to relax and enjoy watching her love it, even with porridge in my hair and part-chewed toast crust in my mouth.
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