She eats!

Saturday I lamented Molly's frustrating eating habits, and you offered advice from your own experiences. [And keep the comments coming; I can use all the help I can get!] What I learned is that I haven't been trusting Molly enough (again). I had expected the transition to table food to be gradual, beginning with eating soft fruits and veggies regularly and then moving up to chunks of meat. But because she wouldn't eat steamed fruits and vegetables, I didn't think she'd be able/willing to eat heartier table food.

I was wrong.

So yesterday I decided to be brave and try a new tactic. For previous meals, I would introduce each food one at a time, starting with the food I expected her to like least because she had a tendency to refuse all other foods once she saw the one she liked (cheese, raisins, bananas, etc). Clearly that wasn't working. So I decided to present all the food for the meal to her at one time and see how that went.

Here's what I served:

Mashed sweet potatoes, Applegate Farms Chicken Nuggets, & fresh blueberries

Let's just say that it was a hit!

During*:

After:

TA-DA!

That nearly empty plate (which David adorably called an almost-happy-plate) may not mean much to you, but it looks like a very happy miracle to me.

The chicken, obviously, was a huge hit. She went for it first and loved it, but without the must-eat-quickly-before-it-disappears drama that there was before.

For the mashed sweet potatoes, I gave her a spoon and kept a different one for myself. Though she mostly waved her spoon around, she did manage to get a few bites for herself. While she was waving her spoon around and eating bites of chicken, I would offer her sweet potatoes from my spoon. And she would eat it...without screaming!

I mentioned before that she had turned on blueberries, but I realized yesterday that she had only started refusing them when I started keeping a bag of frozen blueberries instead of constantly buying fresh. But since they were on sale yesterday, I picked up some fresh "blues" to see if she would eat them. Sure enough, she found them quite tasty, though she clearly preferred the chicken and sweet potatoes. These, too, she would let me feed her, though it was more like half and half in terms of her eating them and me feeding them to her.

A few things to note:

• This was the first time we offered her food on a plate. I wash her highchair tray after each meal, so it seemed unnecessary to use a plate (and I expected her to play with it more than anything else). But it seems that having the structured compartments helped her somehow. And she didn't attempt to play with the plate until almost all of the food was gone anyway, which I took as a sign that she was finished.
• Molly's still not very good at drinking from her sippy cup by herself, so I've always just sat it to the side and offered it to her periodically through a meal. But by sitting it directly on her tray, she would reach for it when she was thirsty, which turned out to be much more frequently than I expected.

One of my concerns about switching entirely to table food was the time that it would take her to eat. And sure enough, it took her 45 minutes to eat last night. But that was 45 minutes with no screaming. In fact, she was practically giddy the entire time, which makes the extended dinner time entirely worth it in my book.

I know this was only one meal and tonight could be entirely different. But last night's success felt epic and was a major boost to me after a tiring weekend of early mornings and short naps. Here's hoping tonight goes just as well.

*Excuse the crazy hairstyle. At one point during the day they were normal-looking pigtails, but this is her post-nap, hurriedly re-pigtailed looked.