would you like some fish with that yogurt?

i have had to acquire a fair bag of tricks when it comes to feeding this kid. he almost always wants to eat, but he can be a little particular.

sometimes he wants 2 or 3 foods at a time, and to rotate through them bite by bite. other times, giving him more than one option means he only eats the favorites and the others get tossed to the floor or mashed to a pulp in his hand.

sometimes flailing at an approaching spoonful of food means he's tired of it, other times he's trying to hold the spoon himself.

sometimes giving him his own spoon solves the problem, other times it just extends his reach and makes it even easier to fling food around.

it is alot of fun to see him get excited about a new food. recently grapes caught his attention, and after only one bite, he was seriously clammoring for more. today he saw them on the counter and immediately started signing 'more' (which he apparently really does have confused as the sign for 'eat'). he completely ignored the big full glass of water only a foot away, so you know he meant business. he pitched a fit the entire time it took me to wash them and then when i sat with him to cut them up, it broke my heart to see him straining in his effort to reach out for them. i can usually only give him 3-4 pieces of finger food at a time, or he starts playing more than eating. so it took several attempts to get a shot of him with the grapes, because he kept eating them faster than i could get the camera to take a shot:


one of my tricks when he's eating something he's not as enamored with is to alternate bites with something i know he likes, such as applesauce. today was his first taste of fish, and since he has so far rejected chicken, i started out with this alternating system. we ran through the applesauce pretty quickly though, and moved on to finish off his yogurt from breakfast.


i know. i know. fish and yogurt. banana yogurt. i'm not going to pretend it didn't gross me out, especially when i noticed a few times too late that he accepted a bite of yogurt when he still had the fish in his mouth. *shudder* but hey, it worked! i can't say he was enthusiastic about the fish, but he did eat about 2 ounces, which is more chicken than i could ever get into him.

i am actually impressed with myself, not because i manage to get food into him but because i have actually handled the mess he makes pretty well, considering my clean-freakishness. most of the mess that isn't due to a hand (or spoon) knocking away an incoming bite is due to him just exploring his food, as is only to be expected. while it's not a pretty sight, i do enjoy watching him take a bite of something he's been eating for some time out of his mouth and closely examine it, like it all of a sudden occurred to him to find out just what it was.

he likes to play while he's eating, too. he likes to clap his hands onto his head (plastering food into his hair in the process) and watch me do it back, he likes playing peekaboo when mommy hides under his tray, he likes to offer me a bite of food and then take it back when i lean in to get it. it works out for both of us, i have ways to cheer him up when he's fussy and ignoring his food, and he has ways to keep mommy from getting too upset about how much cleaning she's going to have to do :)

(incidentally, for the post title, i was initially going to reverse it, yogurt with that fish, but i think fish with yogurt actually sounds worse somehow. don't you think? how does that work?)