It’s been a long time since I’ve written on this blog. After my daughter was born I started a new blog called Thatmomjustine. I wrote on it for a few months but then life happened and I started to write less and less because I just didn’t have any time.
Not that there wasn’t a ton of stuff to write about.. I got to celebrate all the holidays with her for the first time, I got to take her to the farm and the pumpkin patch for the first time. We took her to see Santa for the first time, showed her snow for the first time, took her on day trips to the kids museum, grounds for sculpture, Giggleberry and more. Took her to the pool (which she loves!) Took a mommy and me gym class together, had an Easter egg hunt, went to the aquarium and celebrated her 1st birthday!
It’s been a very busy and eventful year! I wished I could go back and write about all the details, but it’s been too long and I would never be able to catch up, so I’m just going to start fresh from right now.
So my daughter is officially 15 months old. She is walking around and doing more and more every day.
Being a mom has been a lot of fun, but it has also been challenging. Ever since Olivia was born she has been on the small side and not a very good eater or drinker.
When she was still just drinking formula, it was really hard because I would be writing down in a journal how many ounces she would drink in a day and some days she didn’t drink much at all. Some days she drank a lot, but then suddenly she wouldn’t want to drink much for days afterwards.
I couldn’t figure out why some days she would drink really good and other days, she would hardly drink at all. There was no rhyme or reason to it and it drove me crazy!
I was hoping it was just a temporary thing and once she started eating baby food and real food it would get better.
Once she started baby food, it was pretty much the same thing. There were days that she would eat really good and days where she hardly ate at all. It also took her a while to learn to chew even the softest stuff. She didn’t even start to eat things like puffs or Gerber cookies until she was over a year old.
Once she finally started to actually eat real foods and not just play with it or throw it all over the floor, like she had done for months she was about 13 months old and I was so excited! I was getting to the point where I thought she was never going to eat real food and I imagined packing her lunch for school with jars of Gerber baby food.
Now she can eat anything, well she Can eat anything, but she’s a very picky eater. Her favorite foods are pasta, macaroni and cheese, cheesy scrambled eggs, tater tots, meatballs, cheese, chicken nuggets and ritz crackers. However there are times where she doesn’t even want to eat her favorite food. She also likes graham crackers, fruit bars, chocolate chip cookies, donuts/munkins, Cheerios etc. occasionally she may have a little bit of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, yogurt, sloppy joe, tortilla or grilled cheese.
I usually stick to making the same foods every week for dinner because I don’t want dinner time to be a struggle or take longer then it should, like it has in the past. I never thought that I would ever get tired of macaroni and cheese but I am so sick of making macaroni and cheese every week! And even when I make the stuff she likes, she still doesn’t always eat it or eat enough of it!
Like all day yesterday she was barely eating anything so I made macaroni and cheese for dinner, thinking that she was going to gobble it up, but instead she hardly ate any of it. I don’t get it!
It wouldn’t be so bad if she wasn’t under weight, which she is and has been for a while. I have been taking her to see a GI doctor for months, doing everything the doctor says, but it’s still been a constant problem.
I love my daughter more than anything, but I hate feeding her! I would rather do anything else but feed her. There have been times where I got so frustrated that I had to walk away, because I didn’t want to loose my temper with her, there have been times where I’ve cried about it, and times where I just felt like a failure as a parent because no matter what I did or how hard I tried I couldn’t get her to eat.
I just hope as she grows, she will start eating more and more foods and not be such a picky eater. Pray for us! It’s been very hard! 😢
Coping with a Picky Eater:
Hello Readers,
Well I’m still dealing with Olivia and her eating disorder. Although, it’s slowly starting to get a little bit easier. I have finally started to figure out what her go to meals are and I have realized that if I give her food that she really likes, she’s more likely to eat a lot of it. I’ve also discovered a few tricks and short cuts to help along the way. If you have a picky eater too, maybe some of these will help you like they have helped me.
The first mistake I made was that I was cooking more food than I needed to. I would make two boxes of Macaroni and cheese and a whole box of rice and these are two kinds of food that don’t taste that good after a day, so what would end of happening is I would have a ton of leftovers that I would put into a container and stick in my fridge thinking my husband would eat it later on in the week. Well after a week went by and we would go grocery shopping again, I would notice there would be no room in the fridge for the new groceries.Why? Because I had like five containers of leftover food that no one was eating. So I would end up throwing all that food away.
This went on for a few weeks until I realized there was a simple solution to the problem. Just don’t cook so much. So now instead of making two boxes of macaroni and cheese, I only make one at a time, and I only make a two person serving of rice at a time etc.. I feel better about this now, because I hate to waste food and it’s also nice not having to clean out all those containers every week.
The second mistake I made was with the vegetables. My daughter hardly ever eats any vegetables, but I feel that it’s important to keep offering them to her because you never know, she may decide to actually eat them some day. Just like the other food, I was making way too much and my daughter wasn’t eating them, and my husband is even worse than my daughter when it comes to eating his vegetables. So the only person eating them was me. So once again I was putting all the leftovers in containers and sticking them in the fridge.
While shopping at the grocery store last week I found one of the greatest inventions that I have seen in a very long time! Libby’s microwaveable mini veggie cups! They come in packs of four. You peel the plastic top off the cup and microwave it for 25 seconds. It’s a small portion so even if Olivia doesn’t eat it all I can eat it easily and not have to worry about leftovers. If you have a picky eater, I highly recommend buying these!
The third mistake I made was not having an easy back up plan. When I would make dinner for Olivia and she didn’t eat it or hardly ate it, I would rummage around the kitchen cabinets, looking for anything else to give her to eat. Most of the time it would be things like cheese and crackers or cookies, mostly snack food. Although she would eat it, it bothered me that she wasn’t eating a real meal for dinner.
Then I discovered these Gerber meals in the baby section of my grocery store. These were sealed, microwaveable meals that only take 30 seconds to heat up. Most of the time Olivia does eat dinner, but every once in a while when she doesn’t, I just pop one of these Gerber meals in the microwave and she eats them right up!:)
I think as time as time goes on she will start eating more and more and I will continue to find ways to help her get everything she needs throughout the day. I hope these suggestions will help you or anyone else you may know who is going through this also.
Have a a great Week! Xoxo ❤️
The horror of the Toddler! 😱
When my daughter was a baby, I couldn’t wait for her to get older. I thought it will be so much fun once she’s able to do more.
When she was a baby all she did was just sit there. She couldn’t really do much, it was kind of boring, but I made the best of it. I did tummy time with her every day. Read books to her, sang songs to her. Showed her different things, did sensory activities with her etc. but even though I was doing a lot with her, I still felt limited and wanted to do more.
Well I finally got my wish. Now that my daughter is a toddler I can do a lot more with her, the only problem is that because she’s a toddler, she won’t stay still for two seconds. She wants to run around and explore. She doesn’t care where we are or who’s around, she just wants to go, go, go!
Now I really miss the days where she would just sit there and do nothing. I didn’t realize how much I took it for granted.
She also loves to climb on everything and she doesn’t understand that there are things you can climb on and things you shouldn’t climb on. Although the climbing doesn’t really bother me that much because I was also climbing on everything when I was little and my parents let me and they didn’t care.
I guess everyone has different comfort levels as parents where some parents are ok with certain things, other parents would never allow it. It’s not really about right or wrong, it’s about Perspective and how you feel about something.
There are certain things I’m ok with my daughter doing and other things I’m more picky about.
One thing I am extremely picky about is behavior. I don’t want my daughter acting like a spoil, untitled brat. Even though she is young, I’ve started putting her in time out when she is acting out, because she is becoming more aware of things and I need to start teaching her right from wrong.
My daughter is just starting to talk. She doesn’t say too much, but she knows how to say “No!” And she’s not afraid to tell me when she doesn’t want something. All day long I offer her her bottle “No!” I make her eggs “No!” I try to get her to drink more juice “No!” After reading her the same book 20 times, I try to read her a different book “No!” She’s a little stubborn. She gets that from her father, not me.
I love her to death, but I really miss the baby stage. 😭