Dinner time drama

We have a CD with kid’s songs on it. The kids just started listening to this CD a few months ago. There is one song that they love. Who ever wrote the song definitely does not have children. No one with kids would ever even think about putting these words into a child’s head. The kids will come to dinner every night, sit down, and sing, “Oh No!, yucky dinner again… oh no, yucky dinner again!” I don’t know if there are other words to that song but those are all the words that my kids know.

My brother who lives in Seattle area just wrote a blog about how their kids were not thrilled about eating new foods. But they tried it anyway and liked it. That NEVER happens in my house. Tanner has major eating issues. If he was in charge of the universe, all he would eat is Go-gurts.

I make three meals a day (Ok, two meals because I don’t count opening a Go-gurt, slicing an apple, and toasting an Eggo as making a meal.) You would think that with all those meals happening every day, that Tanner would get the concept. You are supposed to eat at meal time- not every 20 minutes between meals. They are not wonderful meals but they are edible. I try to have a side dish that he will eat like corn or cucumbers or peaches or something like that. We also try to get him to try one bite of what we are eating. That is all he has to do- one bite of the "yucky" food. He will not eat hamburger or chicken so that limits us on what we can make that he will like. But he has to eat one bite of it. We give him lots of promises, “You can have dessert if you take this bite.” We threaten, “You can not get down from the table until you eat this”. We have sat with him at the table for 1 1/2 hours before. Lately he has done it within about a half hour so that is not too bad.

He absolutely never likes it. NEVER. We started doing this when he was about two years old. If we got him to taste the new food, he would throw up that food and any other food that he had eaten that night. Literally throw up. We stopped force feeding him that “one bite” just because it was too gross. So for a while he got to be as picky as he wanted, so his eating habits are ridiculous. But now he knows we are serious about the one bite rule so he has tasted a lot of things.

Jaxon is pretty good about eating but if he smells salsa or anything that he thinks is salsa, he has to be on the other side of the table from that food and he still complains that he can smell it. So far Alex likes almost anything we give him. He is starting to hate baby food- but I don’t blame him. He really only wants to eat finger foods but those are messier and harder so I have held on to baby food for as long as I can.

UPDATE: I wrote this blog on Saturday night but had not posted it. Last night we had roast beef. Tanner had one bite on his plate. Of course we got the, "I am not eating that" and the complaining. But he knows that we are serious and he ate it pretty quickly. He didn't gag, or yell "yuck" like he usually does. I said tentatively, "Do you like it?" He said yes!