games we play

I’ve mentioned before about our boy’s eating preferences. They are limited to say the least. We’ve been trying all kinds of things but still his preferred foods list is small and getting smaller. He announced a few weeks ago that he doesn’t like cheese anymore. Sigh. One of my big frustrations has been that he won’t even try new things. Or even things that he used to like and eat, for example green beans or corn. But a couple of months ago we came up with the Edward chart. As in Edward the Tank Engine, a friend of Thomas the Tank Engine. Our boy wants more train locomotives and carriages and freight cars and the wait for Christmas and his birthday is very long so we made a deal for him to work for Edward. Originally the deal was that he try 6 new foods for 6 weeks to get Edward. It seemed too much pressure on the boy to keep to the schedule without failing so we backed off a bit and made it try 36 new tastes to get Edward. Some days are good and we manage to tick more than one box. Other times a box doesn’t get ticked for days. But the end is in sight – three more new tastes and Edward is his. We haven’t made a lot of headway in expanding his preferred foods list but at least now he will take nibbles of more vegetables and some meat. He is resolute in his dislike of rice and pasta. He likes to take miniscule bites of things that barely touch his tongue and call it a bite. So we told him he has to take big mouse bites of things at least, or preferably a rat bite or even better, a bunny bite. Which has evolved over the weeks so now, almost every dinnertime, he will thrust a piece of his dinner at my husband and say “what animal bite?” So he’s learning all about animals, birds and fish and how big they are and what they eat and he’s eating his dinner. All good.

I’m not quite sure how the second game started but in order to try his new taste to get Edward points, our boy also wants his Dad to “talk like an Irishman”. So whenever a new food gets eaten, my husband talks like an Irishman for a minute. This is so funny to our boy he almost falls off his chair laughing. “Do it again, Daddy!” While I have to say that my man’s Irish brogue is far better than mine, the vocabulary is a bit limited and somewhat repetitious, not that a small boy notices.

A hopeful sign maybe, the other night our boy got a hold of my camera and shot a picture of his plate. I would say he's been watching me take pictures of dinners since starting this blog and copied me.

So here is a shot of his almost empty plate, proof that he does, sometimes, eat his dinner.