French Dining

We have had a lot of recent success with French style eating patterns and I'm so relieved to see Jackson's diet expanding and him eating greater quantities. His low weight is always on my mind and I struggle to both get calories down his throat and try to make them nutritious. He's just not a person that enjoys food and it seems like he eats only to survive (I really can't relate to that mindset. He must have inherited that one from his too-thin Daddy).


Here's what's working for us from Bring Up Bebe: limiting snacks to mid-afternoon only (when that's realistic for our schedule), putting him at the table at meal time whether he says he wants to eat or not, limiting milk during the day, a requirement to try everything on his plate (sometime we compromise by letting him lick or smell something he really doesn't want to eat), serving the new or scary foods before the favorites, serving sweets at afternoon snack time to avoid a bedtime sugar rush, serving a wide variety of foods over and over again, even one's he's sure to resist.

He was quickly becoming way too specialized: freeze-dried fruit only, veggies only pureed in store-bought pouches, wanting cereal for every meal (I do understand that urge!), feasting on crackers (he got his hands on so many from others even though I never bought them), drinking milk non-stop, colby-jack cheese only, PB&J but he would only eat the jelly, almost no meat...he wouldn't even eat the junkie food on the kids menus at restaurants like chicken strips and mac-n-cheese because it was french fries only.

When I first cut off snacking in favor of meals (especially car-snacking) he fought back with tantrums, but now he's use to getting more hungry, waiting, and eating at the table. It's so much easier to thoughtfully prepare good foods at the table than the things I would grab for the car.


Here he is eating peaches (a new fruit for him so he only took one bite), chicken in spicy peanut sauce, and sharp cheddar cheese. These foods may not seem exceptional, but I regard them as a wonderful step forward into eating a more diverse array of adult style foods. If he's anything like his parents he'll continue to be picky throughout childhood, but my hope is that we can teach him to try new things, to control when and how he eats junky foods, and put some weight on the kid.

And lastly he's doing the double drinks, which we've given up telling him not to do. It's pretty gross to watch the backwash flow from the milk to the water cup, but that particular problem falls pretty low on our priority list these days.