Samara's eating has been a very stressful piece of our last two years. I had planned to exclusively breastfeed until six months. When we went for vaccinations when Samara was five months, the pediatrician (whom I love, by the way), suggested that Samara was ready to start solids based on how she followed objects, showed interest and her size. I was reluctant at first (and I do wish we had waited that extra month), but in the end we tried with rice cereal and we were never successful. The doctor suggested to keep trying, at first once per day and later three times per day. She said, "you can't make her eat, but she will definitely eventually eat."
We went to the US when Samara was around 9 months old. She still had not willingly eaten one bite of food in her life. A doctor at Michigania was shocked that she wasn't interested in a cheese puff (ew) or ice cream (is she crazy?). She kinda laughed, but at this point, it was super stressful for me. Samara had lost interest in breastfeeding around 7 months, I pushed her to 8 months, and then I ran out of milk on a work trip to Bangladesh (pumped and pumped and nothing came out...). So my nine month old baby was surviving on formula. Of course looking back on it, it's not that big of a deal, and formula now-a-days is totally fine and healthy, but I felt like an awful mom.
We kept trying. We tried whole fruits, veggies, purees, sweets, EVERYTHING, and everything made her gag, cry and get angry. She just didn't like food. She put everything in her mouth, unless it was food. At 11 months she ate her first food willingly, and that was a very rare occasion.
I don't remember the details of the following year, but I know we did our best. We tried as many new foods as possible and tried to give her foods that she enjoyed once. We just kept trying. Sometimes distracting helped, but mostly we got purees into her with a fight.
By the time she was two, she had about ten foods she would eat. She ate many foods in muffin form (macaroni and cheese, blueberry oatmeal muffins, zucchini and sweet potato muffins and sometimes potato), she ate carrot kugel, grilled cheese, pizza, waffles, bagels, toast, pancakes, yogurt, rice cakes, crunchy fish (sometimes...) and probably a couple of other things I'm forgetting. She will eat endless amounts of junk food if we let her (loves chips, chocolate, cookies, cake, ice cream), but I try to keep this away as much as possible, especially given how she doesn't ALSO eat the healthy things. She sometimes eats sweet potato fries (just cut sweet potatoes with a bit of olive oil, baked), but this is the ONLY fruit or vegetable that she eats. She will not eat any meat, eggs, noodles, rice...We could distract her enough to still get squeezies into her (we get the ones with as many veggies as possible). That is it. We seemed to lose foods (fish sticks, carrot kugel...) and not gain any new ones. Whatever I did, I absolutely cannot convince her to try something new.
This has been an extremely stressful thing for me, as of course I want her to be healthy, and not just now, but I think about how she will cope with a school lunch, or eating at someone's house, or when we travel. I have literally lost hundreds of hours of sleep about this, wondering what we could have done differently or what we can do now to fix the situation. I couldn't listen when friends talked about how their kids ate veggies or any normal food. Her teacher told me she doesn't try healthy snacks at school and gave me a look when she said, "she only eats the sweets." Yeah, I know. I hate it. I just got super stressed out.
While I tried to maintain my cool during meal times, I often would try to negotiate with her and I would get stressed. She could sense it, and it was only worse. For a while I tried to stay away at meal times (which isn't hard when you're working full time...but even weekends were miserable for me). Rose seemed to be a bit more successful than me, and she clearly wasn't as personally invested as me, which Samara could definitely sense.
We have good friends here who's daughter (she's five now) also does not like to eat. They have brought her to doctors and specialists across the world and tried so many things. The biggest learning for them, which they shared with me, is that there is NOTHING you can do and that the more you try and push, the worse it will be. The best you can do is to offer new things, offer what you're eating, and just not stress about it.
Meals got so miserable, as Samara would cry no matter what was put in front of her (plus we have a new helper, so I'm more aware of pretty much everything I/we are doing), and I also have much less patience (try not leaving the house for ten weeks...and then being super pregnant...and still not being allowed to really do anything...oh and it's like 100 degrees everyday). Meals nearly always had a time out "When you're ready to eat nicely, you can come out of your room." And they were always a battle. I realized that she for sure had VERY negative associations with meals and food and that I was NEVER going to win this battle. I absolutely cannot make her eat, and it was way more about control than anything else. I got that, but I had never been able to do anything about it before.
I decided two weeks ago to just genuinely stop getting stressed about it - both during meal times and not. I recognized that if Samara goes to bed without dinner or misses lunch, she will fully survive. She always has some breakfast and she still has a bottle of formula before bed (the lack of veggies, meat, etc. just doesn't allow me to comfortably get rid of this, though she is very old for it...but don't worry, dad, she brushes her teeth after the bottle). So, starting two weeks ago, I told Alma and Matt that we would continue to prepare the foods that she likes, continue to try to introduce new things (probably about once per week or a bit more often), always offer her what we're eating and other foods, and after offering twice, just say, ok. She can have squeezies, which she seems to be REALLY into now, she can always have plain toast or cheerios if she doesn't want what we're offering, but that's it.
So this is how meals go now:
"Mommy, what's my lunch?"
"Zucchini bread"
Samara cries. "I don't want zucchini bread."
"Ok, well that's what's for lunch. If you don't want to eat it, then you don't have to."
She runs away crying. I totally don't respond and stay happy (genuinely).
She comes running back. "Is it crunchy?"
"It's super crunchy."
"Will you read a book while I eat my zucchini bread?"
"Of course"
Then she proceeds to eat the whole thing. Then she chooses one or two squeezies (she still won't eat any veggies other than sweet potato fries, so these are critical, even though they're not the healthiest things in the world - it's all we got!).
If she still doesn't want to eat what we're serving, then I just say, "ok" and I give her cheerios or toast or nothing. She has totally survived. Meals are WAAAAAY less stressful (for all of us), and I think we are slowly climbing our way out of this mess. I still don't know what we will do in the long term, but I also know that the more I worry about it, or try to get her to eat new things, the worse it will be, so we will just deal with it then.
We went to the US when Samara was around 9 months old. She still had not willingly eaten one bite of food in her life. A doctor at Michigania was shocked that she wasn't interested in a cheese puff (ew) or ice cream (is she crazy?). She kinda laughed, but at this point, it was super stressful for me. Samara had lost interest in breastfeeding around 7 months, I pushed her to 8 months, and then I ran out of milk on a work trip to Bangladesh (pumped and pumped and nothing came out...). So my nine month old baby was surviving on formula. Of course looking back on it, it's not that big of a deal, and formula now-a-days is totally fine and healthy, but I felt like an awful mom.
We kept trying. We tried whole fruits, veggies, purees, sweets, EVERYTHING, and everything made her gag, cry and get angry. She just didn't like food. She put everything in her mouth, unless it was food. At 11 months she ate her first food willingly, and that was a very rare occasion.
I don't remember the details of the following year, but I know we did our best. We tried as many new foods as possible and tried to give her foods that she enjoyed once. We just kept trying. Sometimes distracting helped, but mostly we got purees into her with a fight.
By the time she was two, she had about ten foods she would eat. She ate many foods in muffin form (macaroni and cheese, blueberry oatmeal muffins, zucchini and sweet potato muffins and sometimes potato), she ate carrot kugel, grilled cheese, pizza, waffles, bagels, toast, pancakes, yogurt, rice cakes, crunchy fish (sometimes...) and probably a couple of other things I'm forgetting. She will eat endless amounts of junk food if we let her (loves chips, chocolate, cookies, cake, ice cream), but I try to keep this away as much as possible, especially given how she doesn't ALSO eat the healthy things. She sometimes eats sweet potato fries (just cut sweet potatoes with a bit of olive oil, baked), but this is the ONLY fruit or vegetable that she eats. She will not eat any meat, eggs, noodles, rice...We could distract her enough to still get squeezies into her (we get the ones with as many veggies as possible). That is it. We seemed to lose foods (fish sticks, carrot kugel...) and not gain any new ones. Whatever I did, I absolutely cannot convince her to try something new.
This has been an extremely stressful thing for me, as of course I want her to be healthy, and not just now, but I think about how she will cope with a school lunch, or eating at someone's house, or when we travel. I have literally lost hundreds of hours of sleep about this, wondering what we could have done differently or what we can do now to fix the situation. I couldn't listen when friends talked about how their kids ate veggies or any normal food. Her teacher told me she doesn't try healthy snacks at school and gave me a look when she said, "she only eats the sweets." Yeah, I know. I hate it. I just got super stressed out.
I nixed all traveling for more than four days to anywhere in Asia, as we couldn't bring enough food with us, and sometimes you cannot access these foods in places like China, Sri Lanka or Japan, where we are interested to see. In New Zealand, Samara lived off of cereal, walnuts, yogurt, grilled cheese, pizza and squeezies. All of the other places she has gone (Jakarta, Lombok, Chiang Mai, Hanoi, Kuala Lumpur, Bali, Kuching, Bangkok, and Cambodia) we have brought all of the food with us and still tried to offer new things (but it almost never worked).
While I tried to maintain my cool during meal times, I often would try to negotiate with her and I would get stressed. She could sense it, and it was only worse. For a while I tried to stay away at meal times (which isn't hard when you're working full time...but even weekends were miserable for me). Rose seemed to be a bit more successful than me, and she clearly wasn't as personally invested as me, which Samara could definitely sense.
We have good friends here who's daughter (she's five now) also does not like to eat. They have brought her to doctors and specialists across the world and tried so many things. The biggest learning for them, which they shared with me, is that there is NOTHING you can do and that the more you try and push, the worse it will be. The best you can do is to offer new things, offer what you're eating, and just not stress about it.
Meals got so miserable, as Samara would cry no matter what was put in front of her (plus we have a new helper, so I'm more aware of pretty much everything I/we are doing), and I also have much less patience (try not leaving the house for ten weeks...and then being super pregnant...and still not being allowed to really do anything...oh and it's like 100 degrees everyday). Meals nearly always had a time out "When you're ready to eat nicely, you can come out of your room." And they were always a battle. I realized that she for sure had VERY negative associations with meals and food and that I was NEVER going to win this battle. I absolutely cannot make her eat, and it was way more about control than anything else. I got that, but I had never been able to do anything about it before.
I decided two weeks ago to just genuinely stop getting stressed about it - both during meal times and not. I recognized that if Samara goes to bed without dinner or misses lunch, she will fully survive. She always has some breakfast and she still has a bottle of formula before bed (the lack of veggies, meat, etc. just doesn't allow me to comfortably get rid of this, though she is very old for it...but don't worry, dad, she brushes her teeth after the bottle). So, starting two weeks ago, I told Alma and Matt that we would continue to prepare the foods that she likes, continue to try to introduce new things (probably about once per week or a bit more often), always offer her what we're eating and other foods, and after offering twice, just say, ok. She can have squeezies, which she seems to be REALLY into now, she can always have plain toast or cheerios if she doesn't want what we're offering, but that's it.
So this is how meals go now:
"Mommy, what's my lunch?"
"Zucchini bread"
Samara cries. "I don't want zucchini bread."
"Ok, well that's what's for lunch. If you don't want to eat it, then you don't have to."
She runs away crying. I totally don't respond and stay happy (genuinely).
She comes running back. "Is it crunchy?"
"It's super crunchy."
"Will you read a book while I eat my zucchini bread?"
"Of course"
Then she proceeds to eat the whole thing. Then she chooses one or two squeezies (she still won't eat any veggies other than sweet potato fries, so these are critical, even though they're not the healthiest things in the world - it's all we got!).
If she still doesn't want to eat what we're serving, then I just say, "ok" and I give her cheerios or toast or nothing. She has totally survived. Meals are WAAAAAY less stressful (for all of us), and I think we are slowly climbing our way out of this mess. I still don't know what we will do in the long term, but I also know that the more I worry about it, or try to get her to eat new things, the worse it will be, so we will just deal with it then.
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