The fun picky toddler stage

Jenson has reached the picky-eater toddler stage for sure.  It can be quite a chore to try to figure out what he’ll eat that’ll still give him enough nutrition.  I try to vary his diet, but it’s hard because he goes back and forth on so many things.  We always try to get him to eat what we are going to eat, but unfortunately, we aren’t good at sitting down to eat at the same time as him.  We don’t get home from work until around 5:45 pm, and he’s ready to eat right then.  We pull out our leftovers from the night before and stuff he didn’t eat for lunch, and see what he will go for that night.  Whatever he doesn’t want, he immediately throws on the floor to a very grateful Boof.  We try not to give him fruit until the end, because he’d gladly fill up on fruit and we’d never get anything else in him.

He refuses almost all meat.  Sometimes he’ll take a bite, or we’re able to hide it in something else, but often he’ll pull out any piece of meat that he gets in his mouth and throw it down.  He refuses most veggies when presented alone – they too have to be a part of something, and he’s still likely to pick them out.  He’s good with bread, but we don’t keep much around and try not to give it to him all of the time.  He loves pasta and things with red sauce or cheese sauce.  He loves all dairy, though he doesn’t drink much milk by itself.

I make him smoothies with all kinds of stuff in them and he loves those.  I just throw random bits of veggies and fruit, along with plain greek yogurt.  I use one of those personal blender cups and it makes enough for 3-4 servings.  The last one I made had the following: plain greek yogurt, banana, strawberries, frozen whole cranberries, beets, avocado, butternut squash, and pumpkin.  It actually tastes pretty great!  I usually throw in frozen spinach or kale, but I think I was out for this one.  I have refillable pouches that I pour the smoothies into, but they are also pretty thick so they can be spoonfed.

These are the things that he’ll usually eat:

• Eggs (sometimes)
• Oatmeal (I usually stir in some fruit)
• Blender pancakes (banana, pumpkin, sweet potato – usually made with oats and little or no sweetener, like maple syrup)
• Smoothies (with fruit and veggies)
• Plain greek yogurtFruit – any fruit…not going to bother to list them, but I don’t think he’s ever refused any type.  He particularly loves bananas and blueberries (that’s my boy)
• Applesauce
• Cottage Cheese
• Avocado (only sometimes now, though he used to love it)
• Bread/rolls
• Mac and Cheese
• Pasta or gnocchi with red sauce
• Cauliflower crust pizza (probably one of his favorite things right now)
• Canned pumpkin or squash (sometimes)
• Cubed sweet potatoes or butternut squash (sometimes)
• Cheese
• Black beans and refried beans
• Potatoes-based foods, sometimes (mashed, fries, shredded)
• Beets (used to, anyway – haven’t had them plain for awhile)
• Hummus (sometimes refuses it now)

• Baby food pouches, fruit/veggie/grain combos – I buy these for quick/easy meals when we don’t have anything with use or need him to eat fast.
• Cheerio-type snacks, Plum Organics toddler snacks (O’s, freeze-dried yogurt, or curls), goldfish

I’d love to get more veggies in him, other than what I put in smoothies, pasta, and from store-bought pouches.  But most parents of toddlers complain that they can’t get them to eat veggies, so I know it’s a pretty common thing.  We just keep putting stuff he doesn’t like on his tray and hopefully at some point he’ll give them a try again.  He ate almost every veggie and meat that we gave him between 8-12 months, and we did baby-led weaning, so it was actual pieces of stuff, so it’s hard to get used to him refusing so much now.  We can trick him into eating some things by mixing in applesauce or red sauce, but that’s hit or miss.  I know he doesn’t need much meat, as he needs less than 20 grams of protein per day, so while we still offer, I don’t worry about trying to push that much right now.  Eventually I’ll find ways that he likes it, or he’ll just start liking it again on his own.

We give him pretty small pieces of food of about thumbnail size– he’s a food-shover (like boof) and tries to get all of everything in his mouth RIGHT NOW.  He’s choked/gagged enough times that we’d prefer to be more careful until he has more teeth.  While he got his top 2 molars and another bottom canine tooth in the last 2 weeks, before that he only had 6 teeth (4 top, 2 bottom), so he still wasn’t capable of really biting off pieces well or chewing thoroughly.  Babies chew with their front teeth and mash with their gums, but we never went the full-fledged baby-led weaning purist method of giving large chunks of food for them to gnaw on.  We try to allow him to feed himself and to stop when he doesn’t want more of something, but it’s still hard to know if he’s getting enough food in total.  Although the amount that his belly sticks out now is probably an indication that he’s quite well fed.

We prefer not to give him sweets or salty snacks (like chips or pretzels) – though he’s had tastes.  We aren’t opposed to him ever having these things, but are in no rush to introduce him to the junk food world.  It’s a slippery slope for kids.  As far as I’m concerned, if he doesn’t realize he’s missing these things yet, so its not like he feels deprived.  As long as he’s asking for apples and ‘nanas every time we walk through the kitchen, fruit is probably sweet enough for him now.  He’s perfectly happy eating a snack of halved blueberries and shredded cheese too, so I try not to automatically fall back on cereal pieces and processed food snacks.

We need to get better about eating with him, so that he sees us eating a variety of foods.  He’s also more likely to try a food if it’s something we are eating.  He refused lentils for several meals, and then when I was eating a bowl of them, he ate almost half of the bowl.  Another morning he ate half my eggs, even though he wasn’t that interested in eggs recently.  It’s just hard during the week with our work schedules.  We don’t usually make/eat dinner until after he goes to bed around 730-8 p.m.  We’re just so used to eating later that it’s a hard switch for us too.  But if it makes it easier to feed him, it’s probably worth a shot.

Do you have any suggestions of things we should try to give him?  Am I totally forgetting about something that he’ll probably love?

He loves chewing on his fake broccoli, but unfortunately we can’t get him to eat real broccoli anymore.