If there's one thing I haven't talked about in much detail, it's Chloe's eating habits. They are horrible. Feeding time is more often than not just a huge pile of stress and tears, sometimes on both parts.
You see, Chloe is a bit underweight - she was always between 1st-4th percentile. I kid you not, the child is tiny. At 11 months, she's not even 18lbs yet, that tiny. I've had public heath and nutritionists constantly checking with me, wanting me to bring her in monthly to be weighed, so it's important that I make sure she's eating enough.
She's always hated eating. When she was on only formula, she would push the bottle away after only a few ounces. Once I started her on baby food, she hated it, and that was an even worse struggle. Now, after 5 months of baby food, she still constantly bounces back from eating a nice amount, to eating just about nothing.
She cries, she hits the spoon, sometimes she's just plain distracted. Foods she gobbles down one day, she fights not to eat the next. I've tried all the tricks, I've tried forcing her, I've considered giving up.
I am convinced that I have an anorexic baby. If you think you might have an anorexic baby too, here are some tricks I've tried that have worked (even if only for a little while) to get her to eat.
- Try everything. I've given her fresh deli meat, grated cheese, yogurt, pieces of bread, rice treats, ice cream, anything just to see if she'll eat it, and to get her used to all kinds of tastes and textures. If I'm at a restaurant with her, I let her try a little of what I'm eating to see if it's something she might eat if I tried it at home.
- Mix it up. She hated carrots, so I put about 3 tablespoons of her pureed carrots in a bowl, and about 2 tablespoons of her rice cereal (it was rice cereal with apple and banana) with some of her formula to make it less thick. She gobbled it down three different times before she refused to eat it again. I've tried it with other vegetables, and one time added some pureed apples when she still refused to eat it.
- Play 'Hide and Seek'. If they hates a certain vegetable, mix a little bit of it with something she does like. Or put a little bit of both on a spoon and see if they takes it better.
- Keep trying. If they don't like something one day, give up for awhile and try again later.
- Give them choices. On days Chloe wouldn't seem to eat anything, I just threw a bunch of random things onto her tray: grated cheese, lunch meat, pieces of bread, cooked pasta. Whatever was available.
- Distract them. Sometimes if some baby food dropped onto the tray, Chloe would get so distracted by it that she would willingly take a few bites. The same thing happened if I gave her a spoon or something to play with. Singing also worked sometimes.
- Make it fattening. By that I mean throw in some extra calories where you can. I always make Chloe's cereal with her formula, no matter what the packaging says. She gets more calories from her formula than she would if I used water. I also sometimes dip pieces of bread into baby food.
Do you have a little one at home who isn't a huge fan of eating? Or any tips to share?
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4 comments:
Ugh. That sounds difficult. I hope, for your sake, she grows out of that soon...
Here's what you do. You find a picture of Emily with a feeding tube in her nose and say, "Now listen my little Chloe. This is what happens to girls who don't eat. Do you really want me to stick a tube down your nose?"
I'm pretty sure she will eat! ;)
I feel your pain sister...I truly do!
I'm sorry, that sounds so difficult and frustrating. I don't have any tips unfortunately b/c my child is a little piggy that can't seem to eat enough. But it sounds like you're doing everything you can.
Lili was like this- we struggled to get her to take solids- she nursed until 2 (every 3-4 hours! FOR TWO YEARS!). She wouldn't take a bottle. She wouldn't eat baby foods, the mush in jars. Finally when she was about a year, she would SOMETIMES eat finger foods- cheerios, little pieces of banana, etc- but only if she could do it herself. She didn't hit 20 lbs til about a year and a half. That's about when she'd start taking sippy cups too. We were always bringing her in for weight checks, and told she was 'failure to thrive'. They told us to give her high-fat healthy foods like tofu and avocado.
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