My daughter, Ella, was about 10 months old when I noticed she was gradually turning orange. You know that fake-tan-gone-wrong hue? Subtle, but definitely orange. All over.
The sad thing was, I wasn’t surprised – I knew exactly what the reason was.
Feeding was never going to be a problem for our children. That’s what my husband and I used to say to each other before the girls came along. We were both such foodies and our enthusiasm would be infectious. Any child of ours would surely be a gourmet. So, we were both completely flummoxed when our first daughter was born: slim at birth and destined to cling precariously to the 5th centile at the bottom of the growth chart, entailing regular checks in case she fell off the graph altogether. And astonishingly, breast milk, formula, moving to solids… none of it seemed to excite her particularly. This was a child clearly on the ‘eat to live’ rather than ‘live to eat’ side of the coin. We were baffled.
And oh, the guilt. Why can’t I make eating more interesting? Is it too hot / cold / smooth / lumpy/ boring / adventurous? Why are my friends’ babies all bonnie and bouncy and mine is a bit of a scrawn?
Maybe mealtime needed to be more fun? So we started ‘the train’ method. You know, the spoon is loaded up and…’Here comes the train… it’s heading for the tunnel, yum yum!’ Only, in desperation (and with a child who loved the story element) this train’s journey had to become more and more elaborate. And my arm, attached to the spoon, started to get a serious workout: ‘Here comes the train, it’s going up the hill, down the hill, round the corner, stopping at the station, round another corner and now it’s going into the tunnel. It IS going in THE TUNNEL... Come on Tunnel!!!’ Mealtime took longer and longer, and honestly, we probably could have travelled London to Birmingham ourselves, the time it took some days.
Speed wasn’t our only problem. Far from gourmet, Ella had fixed ideas of what the spoon-train should bring, and these were, as far as I could tell, based on sweetness. The sweeter the better. I knew she couldn’t live on a diet of pureed fruit alone, so I worked my way through various veg. The tunnel opened for butternut, carrot and pumpkin, but rarely for potato, broccoli, peas. And before I knew it, the little ratbag started to make her own rule – orange food good, other colours bad. It was only when she actually started to turn orange that I realised things really had to change.
The funny thing is that I can’t exactly remember what happened next. I think I was so shocked that I just stopped: stopped the colour-based diet, stopped the never-ending trains, and started just a normal balance of food presented in a more ‘take it or leave it’ way. We probably had a wobble for a while, but I was more scared of poisoning my child with carotene than failing the dreaded growth chart, so one way or another we figured it all out.
Roll forward a quarter of a century, and the same daughter is indeed a foodie, and perhaps even more adventurous than either of her parents.
And I’m back thinking again about the challenges of mini picky eaters, as we create the new Embers episode about food and eating – ‘Picnic Time’, and the guidance for parents and activities for families that go with it. For a while there we really ‘made a meal’ of mealtimes. I do hope Embers will help other families take an easier path than we did!
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