Flippin' Switches & Changing Tracks

My daughter's diet over the last couple of years has been, to say the very least, limited. She wouldn't touch vegetables with a ten-foot pole and her fruits were limited to bananas and the fig in Fig Newtons. She wouldn't eat any lunch meat, her only real meat was chicken and that was only under deep-fried conditions, and her starches were crackers, refried beans, and chips. You might think she had a peanut butter fetish (okay, one might still think that, but that's all going to change soon, I just know it). Thankfully, she drank a lot of water, but that was the only healthy aspect to her diet, really.

Now I don't know who or what is responsible for what has transpired over the last week. Who - or what - it is, I'd love to wrap my arms around them and welcome them to the family, give them a spare key to our place and possibly write them into our yet-nonexistent will. Beth's daily diet usually looks like this:

Breakfast: 1/2 cup milk
1/2 peanut butter sandwich on wheat bread

Snack: 10 Wheat Thins or Triscuits

Lunch: 1/2 peanut butter sandwich on wheat bread

Snack: Banana

Dinner: Nothing. She hated just about everything I made except for burritos or quesadillas.

As a result of not eating her dinner, she got no dessert. She often went to bed hungry.

That said, we didn't start enforcing the "If you don't eat your dinner, you get no other food until breakfast the next day" mantra until the last six or seven months, basically since we moved into this place. Is it possible that it's paying off? She "gets" it? I ask this because this was today's diet:

Breakfast: 1/2 cup milk
1/2 peanut butter sandwich on wheat (mommy was too tired
to make eggs this morning)

Snack: 1/2 diced peach (fresh, not canned)
1/2 container of cherry yogurt

Lunch: 1/2 peanut butter sandwich on wheat again (we're on a budget
this week; once we're back to normal, I'm thinking of
euthanizing the whole Peanut Butter Extravaganza)

Snack: 3 baby carrots

Dinner: A few bites of chili, to which she replied, "It's yummy
delicious!!!"

Snack: A whole Granny Smith apple

Does my daughter, who is - much like her mother - not so swift on the uptake at times, finally understand that she needs to eat what she's given and that maybe, just maybe, it's okay to try new foods if they look appealing?

That above-mentioned peach? Her first in about 2.5 years. That's right: two and a half YEARS.

I hopped out to the store tonight with cash I got selling an old PDA and bought more yogurt, string cheese, and grapes. Weeeeeeee!!!!!

The Ant Fiasco

We're one of those ratty families that lets their kids snack in the car and it's finally, after three years**, come back to bite us in the ass. Or, more appropriately, the arms/hands/ENTIRE BODY if you ask my daughter.

We went to leave this morning and I noticed a swarm of ants on my son's convertible carseat. Unfortunately for all involved, I freak out. I farking HATE ants. Creepy crawly bastards. My daughter needs no further prompting and starts freaking out too. Now we have two spazzing females and one irritated male. He's trying to brush out all the crumbs and ants from my baby's seat. I try to put my daughter in hers. Huh-uh. No way, no how, was she going to get in there what with the ants making light work of the very-old-cookie-laden cupholder on her booster seat.

Finally, we decide to pack it all in and haul cookies (please excuse the well-placed pun) to the nearest carwash. Sadly, the one across the street was packed to the gills, so we had to go to one a few minutes away. The whole drive there, I'm sitting with my knees together, my boobs scrunched together with my arms wrapped around my purse, and my eyes darting left and right like a Nervous Nelly, convinced that at any moment the ants'll go marching one by one across my shoulders.

Fast-forward to the carwash. My husband, for reasons still unbeknownst to me, insisted I stay outside and "talk" to him while he washed the car. We shared all of five words in 10 minutes. I caught a peek into the backseat and my daughter has flipped her lid. She's screaming, no, she's HOWLING in the backseat, flicking ants off her arms and legs. Poor baby. At this juncture, I really did feel bad. I know how bad the heebeejeebies can get and to be three and feeling it? :(

So my husband pulls the car up to the vacuum and if you thought there was mayhem before, you were wrong. We get her and my son out, as well as their carseats, and as I'm cleaning his, she's STILL shrieking like a banshee. She was having TREMORS. I had to show her both car seats, post cleaning, and the clean interior of the car before she stopped wailing and accepted that "mommy and daddy made the ants all gone."

The rest of the day was lovely! I got my hair cut, and so did Beth, and then we went to lunch at Chevy's. Mmm. Did some shopping at Walmart with the kids, came home, and then had to make a return trip to Walmart with my son to return the formula I bought because I got it home and discovered the metal lid under the plastic lid had been compromised.

All in all, a wonderful day.

**It hasn't been three years since we've cleaned out our car, just three years of feeding the child(ren) in the car. We cleaned it out a few months ago.

There's A Light at the End of the Tunnel

Now I don't want to jinx it, because I have a way of doing that when I mention what could be on the forefront thus causing the exact opposite to happen, but I think my three-year-old demon might be turning a culinary corner.

I may have mentioned in the past that her diet is, well, limited to say the very least. Her diet mainly consists of peanut butter sandwiches, any kind of Mexican food, tuna fish, bananas, wheat crackers (which I haven't bought in about two months) and any kind of bread that crosses her path. Sad, right? Since we moved, we've gotten her to eat - repeatedly, so as to nix any ideas of a fluke - scrambled eggs, white rice, ground beef, Granny Smith apples, chow mein noodles, fried rice, and a bite or two of a baby carrot. I actually caught a picture of her chowing down on an apple about two weeks ago:



I was stunned. She ate the whole darn thing! Well, she won't eat the peel yet, but hey, I'll take baby steps. She ate another one today. I'm thrilled! I can only hope this is a sign of things to come. Lately she's been approaching me with whatever I'm eating, asking for "a taste." That turns into several tastes if it turns out that she likes what I'm having! She nibbled a baby carrot today while I was snacking on them.

Some days, I'm bursting with pride for my spawn. My little one started pointing today to indicate he wanted something. Beth never did that - for reasons that, to this day, are beyond me but I think were part in parcel of her speech delay - and so this is kind of exciting! I hope it leads to speech!

Yay for my kids!

Me and my babies:

Update on the Battle of Wills

We went through the same rigamarole with dinner last night. On the menu: chicken hot dogs and corn. It was 10:30 p.m. and two failed attempts to go to sleep before she gave in and ate half the hot dog. She couldn't get to sleep because she was hungry!

I wonder how many nights of this we'll have to do hold out on her before she gets it?