I’d like to think our kid is pretty comfortable in her own skin and the world around her. We go to daycare, she never cries when we drop her off and gets right into the mix, smiling and playing with the other kids like she never missed a beat. We visit friends and family and with the exception of a brief warm up period, she is smiling and opening up just like at home. She has always been this easy-going, happy and friendly baby that pretty much responded to all your stimulation in positive, geeful ways directed right toward mommy or daddy’s heart. Can our luck run out at some point- maybe with one or two new additions??
Then came her 1st birthday. She is no longer a baby! You can’t set her down in one spot anymore and expect her to be there for more than a millisecond- all she wants to do is walk, crawl, take things apart, put them together, repeat. In fact, you can’t even sit the child down to eat anymore without major protest!
Somehow with all the wiggling, refusing to be fed and throwing of food over the side of the high chair with a sneaky smile, she managed to gain 3 lbs. since April when she wasn’t eating last too! Feeding has to be a huge independence milestone because what could be more personal than determining what goes into your own body? I can certainly appreciate this and I am trying very, very hard to keep in perspective that the developmental need for her to make these decisions is actually more important than her nutrition at this point- at least that is what the experts tell me.
She is not hugely into feeding herself yet so I worry about her not getting enough food to power her little motor through the day doing all her “baby work”, as we call it. Before, we could give her a bunch of toys and some finger foods and she’d play with them all and let you feed her endless spoonfuls of mushy food while she was distracted. However, She wasn’t really into the texture of things and definitely didn’t like things that stuck to her hands as she picked them up (ok- that’s almost everything!). Now, in the last week, since trying the all so amazing chicken nugget and rice puff, she flat out almost completely refuses to let you feed her! She likes to try and scoop out the food herself with the spoon and get it to her mouth herself (still some bad aim!), but really won’t feed herself a lot…. and won’t let us feed her either! The only things she likes to feed herself are pretzels, graham crackers, rice puffs, cheerios, teething biscuits or other processed carbs! Not really interested in things normal people would call “healthy”. Again, mommy is having a coronary, but trying to keep perspective since turning what I view as an eating catastrophe into a power struggle could be the worst thing to happen at this point. Hmmmm… any suggestions wiser more experienced parents?