Raising a fussy eater

The one day she eats like a champion, eats everything I give her and even lets me feed her. The next day, she hates everything on earth (even though I spent hours in the kitchen making something special for her), spits everything out and throws the rest on the floor and its all met with a very mischievous smile.

The Reality

I read so many articles about “the ideal 15 month old” and these usually include some fantasy universe that I have never heard of – “three balanced meals a day, no more milk and 2 snacks” ; what !? I have days where she eats 3 cubes of cheese and has 4 bottles 🙈 and trust me, its not from a lack of trying or for me not caring, its after I have tried to get her to have 4 different meals with pasta cooked 3 ways and every little trick you can think of. It’s exhausting to the point where once she does eat those three cheese cubes it feels like I just won the lottery haha.

I have tried everything under the sun to get her to eat, one week everything goes great, the next she spits out everything I give to her, but make no mistake, she demands a piece of whatever I am eating, just to spit it out on the carpet and step on it, some days it takes real stenght to take a deep breath and try again. But in the end I do, and we just try again, its a learning curve to be honest, and every littel thing that does not go according to plan makes you very anxious as a new mother, hopefully I will be much more relaxed with the second one.

It gets worse

So I have been ranting on about how she does not want to eat anything, but what I did not tell you is that she is also going through “nap regression”; she is tryiing to drop one nap a day, which means she is transitioning to only one nap a day (keeping a toddler busy for most of the day is an adjustment for both of us haha). The problem with this is that she still falls asleep with her bottle, so at about 10 in the morning she is tired, cranky and yawning, so she is tired right? WRONG! haha, she lies in her bed with her bottle, has it, then throws it out the cot and yells till I go fetch her (this continues for about 2 hours before she actually goes to bed in the end), after which she has had about 3 bottles already (granted, only 90 ml each, but still). This leads to her skipping lunch because she is full, and we are nowhere closer to getting her off the formula.

Success

I have however found a follow up milk for after formula, we have been on it for a day and it is going great, her appetite seems to be a bit better as it does not make her as full as her formula does and then she is more willing to try new foods and to let me feed her what she cant eat herself, its early days so fingers crossed.

One thing I have realized since becoming a parent is that the whole thing is a learning curve, you learn as you go haha, each child is so different and they all have their own ideas about how they want things to go , and as much as we would like to say that our kids do not rule our worlds, lets face it , they just do.