Sharing is Caring II

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In the original post, Sharing is Caring, I wrote about how I got Fleur to try new things by imitation of my eating them then how it morphed into her feeding me when she didn’t want it.

Now, my wife is concerned about my loss of weight. It has been about eight pounds in the past two weeks. Since discovering it and given that so much is up in the air, I have become more cognizant about what may have changed.

  • The familial isolation: we are holed up at home and limiting our going out. One would think that would mean being more sedentary, but I found that I burned 1200 to 1600 more calories on days where I stayed home with Fleur than days where I went to work without going to the gym.
  • Fleur play: To help Fleur sleep, we need her to be as active as possible. That means going outside and getting her to run and jump and move.
  • Dietary habits: At work, I typically ate breakfast, a morning snack, lunch, and an afternoon snack. I might miss the morning snack if things got busy but that is because I had a 3 hour window between breakfast and lunch and really I needed more time between the two. I am finding I typically miss the snacks at home because I am juggling work and toddler.

But, then there is also the toddler. She wants my food. We endeavor to give her the same food we eat at dinner. However, the food on my plate is the BEST food. She always wants it over what is in front of her. She especially wants my portions of her favorites. Portion control goes out the window when the toddler is taking some random amount of them.

Prima manducare

halloween candies
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Part of parenting seems to be to tasting foods given to our children. We get that taste in before it is put in front of the child. Call it a toll or tithe.

My wife still does it to Galahad before letting him have an interesting new drink or dish. Or one that she likes but did not get.

They argue about whether or not she took too much. She calls it a bite or sip. He calls it a mouthful or guzzle.

He also complains about her taking the best candy from his Halloween exploits.

Primarily, he is suffering from loss aversion. He envisioned having it. Only now Mama is taking it away from him and diminishing the value.

Sharing is caring

baby children cute dress
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In encouraging Fleur to eat new foods, I often give her something I am eating. When she falters at consuming her meal, I often eat some of hers and make yummy sounds with the idea of showing it is safe to eat.

This safe to eat approach is based on evolutionary theory that children pay attention to what parents eat to determine what is safe. She would look dubious at some things we gave her that we also were not. And then she also demanded things we had in front of us.

The eating and saying yummy has backfired because when she is done, she now holds it out to me to eat. No one else. Just me.

Recently, this has morphed into her feeding me. She will put food next to my mouth until I eat it. Of course, these are foods given to her to eat that she stopped consuming.

At least the food doesn’t go to waste.

 

Messy eating

girl eating watermelon
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A friend posted a photo of his kid’s first experience with a messy food and the spectacularly messy result. It reminded me that we totally have a strategy for certain foods like this that tend to get everywhere.

  1. Undress the kid. This keeps from having to treat the clothing with more expensive products to get out stains.
  2. Save the messy foods for just before bath-time. Wet washcloths work best for getting the food off skin. The bedtime routine includes a bath. Saving these foods for dinner makes it easy to go straight from mess to cleaning them in the bath to bed.

Impressive how much of a mess kids make. I remember my younger brother particularly getting a blackberry cobbler all over himself. Fleur seems more inclined to wearing food than necessarily eating it.

Our metric for how much she liked something was based on how much she ate versus played with the food. Of late, I am more dubious about this measure as it seems she can get bored. Interest in novelty can be good, but also challenging as we figure out what she wants without words.