Dining Dilemma

Today is my trio’s fifteenth month birth date. They are good little babies and drink only from their sippy cups and eat in their feeding chairs like real toddlers (even if they can’t quite toddle just yet!) They drink whole milk instead of formula and eat real table foods.

That’s the problem, really. They are old enough to eat real table food, not the pureed variety that comes in a jar or little plastic container. In fact, they have stopped eating anything that remotely resembles baby food. If it’s soupy or mushy, they won’t eat it.

Also, they have apparently made some uniform decision not to eat anything that they cannot pick up all by themselves. I know this should be a phase and all, but we are going on three weeks of this.

All they seem to want to eat is chicken tenders or ham chopped into tiny bite-sized pieces. They will eat cheese cubes and those little individually packaged servings of veggies from Wal-mart. Unfortunately, that’s about all they will eat.

I have tried chopping up fresh fruit, giving them fruit cups, or even applesauce. Their final verdict on that is that the fruit is much too slimy to be any good, and the applesauce is much to much like baby food.

I have tried being creative by giving them those Gerber Graduates dinners, but those mostly require spoon feeding, which they aren’t really all that great at yet, and they refuse to let me spoon-feed them, no matter how much they seem to like what is on that spoon.

I have also tried Hormel, Chef Boyardee, and various other little supposed kid-friendly dinners to no avail. They only want something that they can pick up themselves.

I know that nobody ever starved by eating like this. After all, I should just be very grateful that they aren’t only eating something awful like French fries or Twinkies (I guess it’s only because I don’t buy them!) But when will this end?

I really hesitate to give them a spoon of their own to fill with something messy as my house is so very tiny that we are forced to feed them in the living room on the carpet. For now, they do get spoons and tiny forks with each meal to learn to use them (which seems to be working.) Eventually, I will get brave enough to try something a bit more adventurous.

I suppose we shall soon see how their newly preferred eating habits are affecting their weight once we get to our doctor’s appointment. Maybe she will just be so very glad that we kicked our bottle habits that she will overlook our dining delimma!