Happy Monday! I hope it's a good one. I wrote down three things I wanted to blog about during this last week, and there is a common thread: food. One of my favorite topics. Let's chat!
1. I've been watching the newest season of my favorite tv show: "The Lost Kitchen." I don't watch a ton of Magnolia channel, but it's a Magnolia show and I love it. It follows a woman who started a small seasonal restaurant in her tiny hometown of Freedom, Maine. She hosts 4 dinners per week, seating 48 people each, during the 6 warmest months of the year. The dinners became so popular that they started a system where the only way to get a reservation is to mail them a postcard, and then they draw reservations from the postcards at the beginning of each season. People fly in from all over to eat there. She sources all of her food locally and plans her unique weekly menu based on what produce is available that week. I have no interest in working in the restaurant industry, but it makes me want to grow some of my own produce and plan meals around what's fresh. It also makes me want to create the warm, homey feeling she fosters during her dinners. I also love watching her come up with the menus. I watched the second season during the first part of my pregnancy last year, during a time when I had absolutely zero interest in food and everything made me want to throw up. Somehow this show didn't sicken me. Just made me look forward to being able to enjoy food again. Very fun. Would recommend.
2. The Feeding Littles Course: Last year I purchased an online course about feeding kids and fostering adventurous eating. It was created and taught in tandem by a professional childhood dietician and a childhood occupational feeding therapist, who shared lots of strategies for how to work with kids to get them past picky eating. It was on my resolution list to finally take the class, so after a few days of Jack refusing to touch his dinner, I pumped through it last weekend and really enjoyed it! The content was interesting and helpful, but also I just love the experience of sitting down in a quiet room for hours at a time, watching a class, taking notes, and learning something new. There was lots of information in the course--much of which we've already been doing. I went into the class with a handful of questions about how to handle specific situations, and it answered all of the questions and more.
The main struggle I wanted to troubleshoot was Jack touching basically nothing at dinner, and then either having a bowl of cereal with Jared before bed or begging for a snack after he was already in bed. The more we'd try to make him fill up on dinner and refuse to offer more food afterward, the more tense and less successful dinnertime was becoming. We'd thought about or tried out several different strategies on our own, but in the end none of them felt great or worked great, and I found myself wanting to see what the professionals would suggest rather than stumbling through dinnertime battles and constantly questioning and readjusting my strategy for years and years. One of the top points in the course, which we already knew and had been doing for the most part, is "You decide what goes on the table. Your child decides what and how much to eat." An important footnote is that you should always have at least one thing on the table that you KNOW your child enjoys and will eat. That way they have no reason not to fill their bellies. And then it's good to have lots of variety in the other dishes on the table from day to day, and to vary the brands and shapes of familiar foods they enjoy so they don't get stuck on food looking just one specific way. It also helped to hear them explain that picky eating in children is normal and natural, because evolutionarily, kids had a better shot of survival if they stuck to eating the few foods they knew to be safe, rather than adventuring out to try a new berry or mushroom that may or may not kill them.
So sometimes your kid might eat only dozens and dozens of strawberries for their meal and touch nothing else. Other times they might just eat bowls of plain pasta and nothing else. And the dietician assured us that that's ok! The key is to consistently expose them to a wide variety of foods on their plates and make the mealtime environment casual and fun, not stressful and tense. If they won't try a food, don't say anything. Maybe try playing with the food sometime, with absolutely no pressure to eat it. Yesterday Jack refused to touch a pear I cut up for lunch ("I hate pears!). He just wanted his toasted bagel. Instead of forcing the issue, we had fun hacking away at the pear slices with a butter knife and making shapes. He didn't eat any pear that day, but the next day he tried some pear for dinner, after months of insisting he hates pears. (Another point they made was to have fun conversations and talk about anything else other than the food being served, so I proceeded to say absolutely nothing about him trying the pear because I was playing it cool and casual, lol.)
Anyway, I was skeptical about some of the approaches initially, but when they explained the logic/science behind them, and as we've implemented the information and strategies in the course, I'm a believer. It goes much deeper and they have more practical tips I won't dive into, but it's nice to know that we're doing our side of the job, and Jack's doing his side of the job, and there's research and professional advice backing my strategies now, instead of making blind shots in the dark. It's only been a week since taking the course, but the dinner/bedtime snack struggle is already gone, yay! He knows that dinner is the last chance to eat before bed (the first night he went to bed starving, no issues since), but he also knows that there will always be something he likes on the table and it's ok for him to fill up on it if he wants, so it's not a stressful situation for any of us anymore and he's already trying new foods more and more often and just, yes. Good purchase. 5/5 stars, would recommend the Feeding Littles course if you have a problem with picky eating in your house. The dietary sections were useful, but the strategy sections from the occupational therapist were my favorite.
3. Top 12 Elimination eating! When Jack was the most pained-looking, colicky baby to ever live, I tried everything to find something that would help him. Reflux meds helped a bit, but nothing else did anything. In the 5 years since then, I've heard a handful of people who had colicky newborns tell me that their doctor suggested cutting out dairy and soy if they were breastfeeding, and doing so made a big difference in their baby's temperament. I so wish I would have heard that when Jack was a baby and at least given it a try, and I swore that with baby #2, if she every seemed exceptionally pained or fussy, I would at least try cutting dairy to see if it made a noticeable difference. When Alice was maybe a month or two old and needing to be held in the front pack quite a bit or else she'd be screaming, I cut dairy. It did help! I found that she was able to stay in her swing for longer stretches of time before crying to be held. One day, however, she woke up and screamed all day long. The weirdest part was that she refused to eat. Alice has never had any issues with breastfeeding, so I knew something was up. It occurred to me that I should write down everything I'd eaten the previous day, in case this were to ever happen again and maybe I could make a food-related connection. I hadn't eaten any dairy so I thought it probably wasn't related to my diet. But after a few more semi-fussy weeks and a smattering of days where she looked pained and had a hard time eating, I revisited my list and noticed I had drunk a big soy protein drink. Ironically, I had grabbed it because I was starving at the grocery store but didn't want to grab a dairy protein drink because I was worried it would bother Alice's stomach. In the end, the soy probably hurt her worse. So I tried cutting soy too and it has made a world of difference. Unfortunately soy is in SO many things, but I hardly ever have to front-pack her anymore, she never spits up, and her eczema has almost completely cleared up.
However, there have been days here and there where she seemed to be in pain again, and she'd be back to waking up every 2 hours all night. I began to suspect there was one more food bothering her, but I eat such a wide variety that I couldn't pinpoint what it was. So this last week I've been doing a "Top 12 Elimination." Basically you cut all of the Top 12 foods that babies can be sensitive or allergic to for a week or two. Then you start adding the foods back in, one at a time every 3-4 days, to see if you can pinpoint the trigger. The foods are dairy, soy, egg, wheat, corn, legumes, peanuts, beef, oats, rice, tree nuts, and chicken. I already know she does fine on chicken, and I know she doesn't do fine on dairy, soy, and likely egg. So the 8 things we're trialing at this point are wheat, corn, legumes, peanuts, beef, oats, rice, and tree nuts. Based on my food journaling for the past month I suspect wheat, peanuts, or oats being the culprit. As soon as I started the Top 12 elimination, Alice went back to sleeping great at night, only waking once or maybe twice. No spit up, no eczema, happy baby. There's been plenty for me to eat (not much different than when I was eating paleo in college). But I'm excited to start adding more things in. My first trial is wheat, starting today. As long as her temperament remains cheery and she continues to sleep well at night, I'm not going to be too concerned about a little eczema or spit up, or even mucussy diapers. Hopefully I'll pinpoint the problem during the next month and then coast on through the rest of the year of breastfeeding. Fortunately almost all babies outgrow their food sensitivities as their guts mature before they turn one year old. So I'm not really concerned about any of this. I'd much rather be cutting out a few foods than feeling nauseated by every food like I was last year. Perspective!
Ok, that was a long post. Probably an overshare, but maybe something in here will be helpful to someone. On a non-food note, Jared introduced me to the Martin Short movie "Clifford" over the weekend. As a mother of a 4-year-old, dino-obsessed, smart little sassy pants, and also as a person who grew up in the 90s, I loved it. So funny. I believe it's free on Amazon Prime so give it a watch if you have a dino-obsessed sassy little boy and want some 90s nostalgia.
