picky, picky.

the food diaries of the murphy family: donovan was eating avocados by the time he was 10 months old. he snarfed down pretty much anything we put on his high chair tray. now liam, on the other hand, who is 18 months old and counting, refuses to eat real food. the only "adult" food he will even touch is honey nut cheerios. not regular cheerios, honey nut. even then he will pick out the broken ones and put them off to the side and only eat the whole ones. similarly, we gave him "cars" cheerios (half red frosted, half regular colored frosted) and he picked out the regular colored ones and wouldn't eat the red ones. who is this child? i mean i'm a picky eater too, but even i have a larger palette than milk, baby yogurt, and whole honey nut cheerios. he won't even eat crackers anymore. we thought we were making progress, but no matter how many times i put new foods (regular noodles, green beans, bread, rice, etc.) in front of him, he immediately sorts them off to the side. in a recent development, he has decided he enjoys french fries-so we have something to feed him when we're out to eat. i tried to sneak in some pieces of chicken in with his fries once at culvers to no avail. he picked it out immediately (i think i even saw him sneer a little at the idea). if anyone has any ideas on how to feed an impossibly picky toddler, please suggest away.

let's not forget the antics of our nearly three year old, donovan. his culinary tastes are pretty wide-spread as long as it can be dipped in either ketchup or ranch, and sometimes both. he is a very big fan of jelly sandwiches--as long as you don't mention you've put peanut butter on it. he likes peanut butter, he eats it just fine, doesn't gag, anything, but he absolutely throws a fit if he sees you put peanut butter on his sandwich. "no! i don't like that stuff! not on my sandwich! just jelly!" and if you bring him his sandwich sometimes he'll pull them apart, point to the jelly side, and say, "i just eat this side mommy." i have to remind him at least eight times that he does, in fact, like peanut butter before he'll approach it. but once he does he eats the entire thing. another thing van loves is salsa. especially the chunky tomato kind from chipotle. he sits there with his chips and little cup of salsa and eats the whole thing. sometimes he entirely forgoes the chip and just uses his hand to shovel the tomatoes into his mouth. if only we could get liam to eat that adventurously!

when liam's in kindergarten, i'll be packing rice cereal in his lunchbox. how open to mockery is that? the boy who eats baby food. i'll probably have to send a note to the cafeteria staff requesting that someone please feed it to him because he's not quite sure how a spoon works just yet. we're working on that for first grade.

oy.