The Great Turkey Battle of ‘Aught9
This is not the face of a happy child. Obviously. I’ve talked about our struggle to keep Tessa’s weight up. When we started baby food, she only wanted to eat fruits. Because we wanted her to eat, we didn’t fight her on it very hard. We fed her veggies but kept them sweet and easy – carrots, sweet potatoes, peas. We tried other things but when she resisted we opted to focus more on getting her to eat instead of getting her to eat what we wanted her to eat. Now, she is looking like a normal, pudgy baby so we are starting to push the issue. She isn’t amused.
She hates all vegetables and proteins. We have to dip the vegetables into fruits to get her to eat them. Last night I decided to take a stand. She was going to eat half of the jar of squash turkey dinner if it killed both of us. It was a messy, unhappy dinner time. She spit and screamed and shook her fists and gagged. But she ate half the jar. I gave her a jar of fruits as a reward after. Yes, I’ve tried making baby food in case she just doesn’t like the jarred stuff. I did a sweet potato-zucchini puree, an avocado puree, a cantaloupe-blueberry puree, a squash-corn-broccoli puree. She has rejected them all. She much prefers the jarred stuff.
She still has a lot of yucky cradle cap on her head (yellowed icky skin). I consulted my BFF, Google, and found out that a little olive oil and a soft toothbrush might do the trick. (Actually, my new BFF is SwagBucks. I use it for 90% of my searches now. You randomly earn swagbucks when you do searches. I’ve been using it for 3 weeks and have 35 swagbucks. I haven’t done anything out of the ordinary – just my regular searches that I would normally use google for. You use the swagbucks to buy things from the swagstore. For example, a $5 Amazon gift card costs 45 swagbucks. If I can earn $5 a month to spend at Amazon by doing my regular internet searches, why not? Just as a disclaimer, this link I’m embedding gives me some sort of referral credit if you sign up and use it. But that isn’t why I’m telling you about it – I just happen to think it is kind of cool.) The toothbrush/olive oil suggestion worked amazingly well. I think after 1 more try I should have it all off. But as you can see in the last photo, even washing it twice last night she has crazy olive oil hair this morning.
And Sabrina was feeling left out and wanted to say hi.
The Boy gagged on protein of any kind for a very long time. Fortunately, he LOVED yogurt, cottage cheese, and cheese sticks/slices – and survived on those for years. At 7 he finally eats meat, but still not the portions that he should be consuming. Now it’s negotiable – eat this much and you can have this treat. He’s still not a big vegetable eater – but then his dad doesn’t set a very good example.
I guess we are fortunate that Tabitha loves meat and cheese….not crazy about vegies, but will eat green beans and most all fruits. We still have to do the reward system though like the previous commentor to get her to eat a sufficient amount. If it were left to Tabitha she’d be “all done” after 2 or 3 bites!
Can I just say that Sabrina gets more beautiful with each picture (and I’m not exactly sure how that’s possible.
I’m so glad I’ve always had babies that would eat anything. Gosh it’s so much simpler!
I sort of like the crazy olive oil hair. She does the spiky-do well!
I had to do the same “hide it in fruit” trick for a while with my oldest. If it makes you feel any better, she is now 14, quite healthy, and loves most foods-even green beans and asparagus!
Try washing Tessa’s hair with a bit of dish washing liquid…it cuts the grease! How do I know this? When the same child mentioned above was two, she decided the entire contents of Vaseline Petroleum Jelly would be fabulous in her hair. A neighbor-friend came up with the Dawn idea!
You know, you could go with the look–the wet look, and bet it styles easily too!! She is a doll
Is it just me, or does Sabrina look about 10 in that picture??? Make her stop growing up, would you??
Good job with winning the battle. With three little ones in our house we have a this is what’s for “insert meal tittle”. I’m not a short order chef. I don’t force them to eat anything they very obviously don’t like, but I don’t feel like that today or I don’t want to try that isn’t really a valid choice in our house. I do give extra condiments when necessary. My youngest also had cradle cap for the longest time. I hope the olive oil works for you. It helped him for a little while, but didn’t last long.
My little one is still very, very little. She’ll eat just about anything and still didn’t break 16 lbs at her 1 year check up. Sigh. My second tiny one in a row too.
As for the cradle cap, a doctor friend told me it is essentially like oily dandruff and she suggested carefully using Head and Shoulders on it. It worked pretty well for us and didn’t have the wild hair effect.
Saw your post on DD’s blog. My son will not eat anything that is not pureed (and even some of that is problematic) without gagging and puking. I keep trying but no luck. I have a feeling he won’t even eat a bite of cake at his first birthday next month.
we too had that “gag” versus eating. Where do they learn that so quickly?? LOL Don’t you just love how we all try that hide it covered in fruit or in our case, ice cream! Never did work for us and we still struggle with trying to get them to eat. Amazingly, they eat more of a variety of food when they go to preschool (part time) then at home!!! Must be that peer pressure thing!! Thanks for the heads up on the search engine, I know I use google all the time to check on things. Glad to hear the cradle cap is getting better. I had a sister that had the same issue and my mom had used baby oil and a toothbrush too with great results.
Ok, so I signed up with “swagbucks” but how do they know to give you the credit or is there something I need to do to let them know?