Let The Feeding Begin

My partner and I started this blog almost a year ago, when it looked like we’d be getting 11-month-old twins to foster and (we hoped) adopt. That fell through, and then six months later, we began fostering a 5-month-old baby. He ended up leaving us after a month, breaking our hearts. A few more months went by, and we were given a 21-month-old boy but again, he was moved to another foster home after only a week and a half. 24 hours after losing him, we opened our doors to a new child, a 20-month-old toddler. My partner Ted has blogged in some detail about all this in his blog tedpeterson.blogspot.com.

This brief history is to say that we have gone from having no children and no reason to blog about the feeding of them, to being busy with three different little boys at different times, and no time to blog. Now that we’re getting a handle on it, I wanted to revisit this blog and start contributing to it regularly.

“Baby J,” as we call the 5-month-old in the public world of cyberspace, didn’t have a very demanding diet. We gave him formula and occasionally a bottle of water. “Baby A,” as we called the 21-month-old was a real gut-bucket. When we took him to the pediatrician, he was weighed in at the 75th percentile for his weight even though he was only in the 40th percentile for height. Not an obese child, yet, but certainly a little porker. He would eat everything we put in front of him, devouring broccoli, squash, tofu, everything that wasn’t moving.

“Baby M,” the 20-month-old in our care now, who we fully expect to adopt in 6 months time, is a normal toddler. He’s exactly in the 50th percentile for weight, and 50th for height, so the foster home that had him before didn’t overfeed him, which is good. And his appetite is hardy: he asks for food (“More! More!”) a lot in between meals. There is a lot he does eat, and a few things, mainly vegetables, that he tries and then spits up.

Our theory is that it’s a textural thing. I served him steamed squash in little cubes and he did the spit up thing. So I took it away, and came back it mashed up with carrots, and he tried it again and spit it up. So I took it away, and blended the carrots and squash in with yogurt. He scraped the bowl clean.

I love the fact that he always tries.

I don’t know what he was used to eating at the old foster home. “Baby A,” I know, was used to eating a lot of junk, as evidenced by his reaction in line at the candy shelves we passed in the grocery store and the fit he had when he didn’t get any of it. We haven’t had that same reaction from M. But we know one thing about toddlers: they are always unpredictable.

Figuring out what works and doesn’t work is the purpose of this blog. Input from parents who have faced the challenges of the dinner table, from menus to manners, would be greatly appreciated.