I think all families have a least one picky eater - so far, I have TWO, hopefully not THREE! Most likely my boys come by this naturally, since their dad refused to eat the crust on his bread as a child - it "hurt his teeth." As for me, I'm not much better. The only vegetables I eat are potatoes, corn, carrots, celery and some beans.
I probably should have predicted the "eating thing," or as my husband calls
it, "the worst time of the day," to be a trouble zone when it took us over two months to get our boys to eat solids. Currently, they won't even allow a vegetable to quietly rest on their plates. They generally won't eat bread - so this eliminates all those "easy" meals: PB&J, grilled cheese and deli sandwiches. They don't eat cheese either, so the "bury the veggies in cheese trick" would only turn them away further. However, there is something magical about pizza cheese - they eat that.
So basically, they are meat and fruit eaters - oh, and junk! The "junk" category has continued to escalate from the day the worst thing they drank was water with a splash of juice. How times have changed!
Clearly, I don't have great advice to share for creating the "healthy eater." I do have a few tricks to survive the dinner hour!
- Samples - sometimes we will give the boys a "sample bite" before having them sit down for dinner. Generally, all "samples" go over well and if sampled with success, they usually eat the main dish.
- Ice Cubes - kids LOVE ice cubes. Sometimes we put them in juice, milk or even add to "hot" soup.
- Sticks - we do "apple sticks" and "pear sticks" - far more popular than plain apples.
- Fun names - we have a "Dylan Special" and a "Carter Special" (both
requested often).
- It's all about how you cut it. This always varies for us. For example, having hamburger? (of course no bun, just meat for us) We have a variety fun ways to eat it: sometimes cut into strips, sometimes bites, sometimes whole or the cookie cutters work wonders too!
- Dipping - BBQ and ketchup are the only condiments my kids will consider, and now, only one boy likes ketchup. But, I am very thankful for ketchup, as it has significantly increased food consumption at the Bormann household.
- Lemons - Can you believe my picky eaters' favorite food is salmon? Probably because they LOVE squeezing lemons on it. Because of that, we sometimes also have "white salmon," which is any other type of white fish.
- Try new things chart - since my boys are to the point where
they won't even try good things, we just started a chart. Stars stickers for trying, smiley face if it is healthy. This is helping. I about fell over because Dylan made a deli sandwich (meat/bread only). He only had like 3 bites - but HUGE win!
- SpongeBob - I really don't like anything to do with SpongeBob, but I do like the foods he has added to my kids diet. Carter will eat the yogurt sticks (SpongeBob pink things - is what we call them here), and they both love the chicken noodle soup.
- Put the kids to work in the kitchen! I've found if they help make it, they
are more excited about eating it. So, sometimes our food is a tiny bit extra spicy.
- My husband's big trick was taking a bit of their food on his fork and saying, "I'm going to eat it," and they would quickly grab it back, "No me!" WORKED LIKE A CHARM!
Please share ANY tips!