Compare & contrast: 8 months

    

    

Dance 'til you drop

So you’re cooking for a 2-year old…

That’s the working title for my new reality TV show idea.  There are all of these cooking shows that pit chefs against one another, but not one of them has a judging panel that can give a 2-year old a run for his/her money.  I’d like to offer Z up as a cooking judge.  He’d made Gordon Ramsay look like a softie.

My approach to feeding Z has always been to provide healthy options and hope he eats something.  If he doesn’t finish a meal, I don’t argue (why turn meals into power struggles when you know you can’t win?) and I don’t rush to find something he’d like better.  I’ve found that if he’s not pressured, he will usually try everything and will often finish whatever is in front of him.  He also likes to have company when he eats, but only if you pay attention to him.  If you are distracted (i.e. on the phone, reading a magazine, watching TV), then you may as well leave him to his own devices – he’ll do much better on his own.  But if you chat with him and remain fully engaged with him, then he’ll eat things that he refused 5 minutes earlier.

However, Z definitely has his preferences and I do try to work within them to a point, especially if he hasn’t been eating well for an extended time.  He’s never liked cooked cheese or most meats, which is fine with me since those aren’t very healthy for him anyway.  But getting protein into him has always been a challenge so I keep a supply of plain yogurt, cottage cheese and tofu on hand just in case.

Lately, he has refused to eat anything with color (other than fruit) and he’s gotten even more sensitive to textures than he was before.  He has even rejected his old favorite vegetable – green peas – because he doesn’t like the skins.  (Have you ever tried to peel a pea?  It’s not easy.)  This has made it especially challenging for me to feed him a healthy diet, since nutritious foods are generally brightly-colored and pretty much everything is textured.  Today I did pretty well at lunch (whole wheat english muffin with hummus and havarti cheese, and a side of butternut squash that I baked, pureed, and then mixed with a bit of applesauce), but I’m already worrying about what I’ll give him for dinner.

Luckily, he still eats breakfast and snacks like a champ so I know he’s not starving.  And he also loves to eat Mei-mei’s food, so I’ve been able to get a few portions of pureed peas in his belly.  I just wonder what he’s going to come up with next.

I somehow managed to keep a straight face

I posted this in a “mad chatters” Tweet already, but I wanted to write about it anyway.

Since Mei-mei has started eating solids, Z hovers around in hopes of getting a bite or two of her pureed sweet potatoes (I’ve started making twice as much so that Z gets to finish off what she doesn’t eat).  He’s also in a sharing phase, so he keeps trying to trade some of his food for hers.  I tell him, “Mei-mei can’t eat your food yet.  She’s very small right now.  She doesn’t have any teeth, so she can’t chew like you do. But she’ll grow all of her teeth as she gets bigger.”  And now that she has one tooth, I show it to him and say, “See, Mei-mei’s starting to grow her teeth!  Soon she’ll be able to eat the same foods you eat.”

Today, Z was watching as I changed Mei-mei’s diaper.  He asked, “Where’s Mei-mei’s penis?”  I said, “Mei-mei doesn’t have a penis, honey.  She’s a girl and girls don’t have penises.  Only boys have penises.”  Apparently he didn’t hear the second part of my explanation, because he said, “Mei-mei no have penis now.  Mei-mei too small.  Mei-mei grow teeth, grow penis.”  He said it in the sing-song way he uses when he recites a list of things, “Mei-mei grow teeeeeeeeeeth….grow peniiiiiiiiiis….”

Before and after

Now he can really use those eyebrows to full effect.

Separated at birth?

Chris is a huge fan of the band Oasis, and as such, wanted to name our children either Liam or Noel (after the band’s Gallagher brothers) or Lyla (the title of one of their songs).  Although the band broke up following one of the many brawls between Liam and Noel, and Chris did not prevail in his efforts to honor them through the naming of our children, it looks like Z is paying tribute to them after all.

Liam Gallagher on left, our little man Z on right:

St Patrick's Day Photo Shoot

This is what it takes to get one decent photo of the two of them together...

Happy St. Patrick’s Day

It’s remarkably difficult to get a decent picture of Z and Mei-mei together.  The first picture is the only one (out of 138) that doesn’t have at least one of them with eyes closed, face covered, looking away, scowling, or super blurry.  The next two pictures were a little easier because I only had to worry about one of them at a time (on top of worrying about Mei-mei eating the beads and Z getting strangled by them).  If you look really closely at the picture of Mei-mei, you can see her tiny little tooth poking through!

Hands and feet

Hands and feet, courtesy of Pattycake Prints

What do you need to eat pie?

Why, teeth, of course.  So in honor of pi day, Mei-mei has cut her first tooth!  Anyone who has experienced her jaws of steel will understand why I’m a bit nervous about this development.  When she was born, the lactation consultant said, “She has the strongest clamp-down reflex of any baby I’ve met in over 15 years of doing this job.  You, my dear, have the pit bull of babies.”  And now my (sweet, adorable, darling, lovely) pit bull baby has teeth.  Great.  I was kind of hoping that she wouldn’t cut any teeth until after she weaned.

Happy Pi Day!

Yes, I’m a nerd.  And for further proof of how nerdy I am, note the time this post was published.

mystery solved

A couple weeks ago, we were stumped.  The media cabinet was locked to keep button-loving preschool fingers off of the stereo equipment.  However, we couldn’t find the key.  Finally, Chris noticed that the key was right in front of us:  inside the locked cabinet, taunting us through the glass.  We had no idea how it got there, but we were relatively sure of who was responsible.

After we puzzled over it for awhile, we decided to chalk it up to another inexplicable side-effect of parenting.  I used a wire hanger to jimmy open the cabinet and we didn’t think about it again.  That is, until this afternoon when we heard Z announce, “Fachary has key!”  He ran over to show me the key to the media cabinet, and then he trucked on over to the media cabinet itself.  It was locked, so he stuck the key in the keyhole to wiggle it around a bit.  Then he carefully slid the key into the crack at the top of the cabinet door.  AH HAH!

So there you have it.  That’s how a key gets inside of a locked cabinet.

(And that’s not a typo up there.  Z pronounces his name with an “F”.)