Eating with Toddlers

my son after splashing in the cat water bowl

I was so relieved to have children who love to eat.  When we started them on solids at seven months old, they ate everything!  I proudly told other mothers that my children enjoyed tasting new foods - fruits, vegetables, grains, yogurt, proteins, legumes.  Everything that came in pureed form, my children devoured.  I heard horror stories from other mothers who felt compelled to force feed their children, and I was thankful for my easy eaters.

Then came finger foods.  We cut up the foods we ate into tiny pieces and the twins explored new tastes and textures.  My son loved to eat broccoli.  My daughter preferred spicy dishes.  They ate chicken, beans, rice, pasta, peas, Indian food takeout and Mexican meals.  Everything went in their mouths.  For my daughter, eating was a serious endeavor, requiring deep concentration.  My son thought mealtime was hysterical and giggled between bites.

Which leaves me stupefied.

What exactly happened to my children between infancy and toddlerdom?

My son gained a mouthful of teeth, which must correlate with the formation of the catapult.  He mastered the quick flick of his arm from the elbow, launching hand-held, bite-sized delicacies high in the air.  They oftentimes hit his mother or sister before dropping splat on the floor.  Sometimes he even puts the food in his mouth and chews it before taking it out and flinging it.  Mealtimes have become one way food fights.  And all foods are cast in equal measure.

I start by reprimanding my 15-month-old son.  "No, we don't throw food.  Food goes in your mouth."  Unfortunately, the barrage of flying food is followed by the let's-laugh-at mama-when-she-gets-mad-and-do-it-again strategy.  Which doesn't work.

So then I take his food away.  This usually causes some consternation followed by angry howling from the high chair.  Then comes my firm, "Food goes in your mouth, not on the floor.  Show me how you put food in your mouth," and the return of said food.  Which is promptly pitched over the side of the high chair once again.

Then I remove the child from the table, carry him silently into his bedroom, and plop him on the floor in the middle of the room.  Where he cries for all of two seconds, looks around him, and happily begins to play.  NOT the intended outcome.

Upon returning to the dining room, I see his sister drop all of her food onto the floor.  She is looking right at me, smiling.  She wants attention, too!  She is graceful and delicate and does not opt for the hurling launch.  Instead, she has perfected the open-handed discard, the ladylike free-fall that makes no sound.  Her food selections invariably bounce - onto the carpet, under the potted plant, under the furniture.

Again, the reprimand.  "No food on the floor.  Food goes in your mouth."  My daughter then pretends to put the food in her mouth, she pretends to chew, she says, "Nom nom," and she pretends that I'm not watching as she opens her hand over the floor and discards said food.

Thus the food is removed, the child is removed, and she cries loudly in the bedroom.  I sit down, take a deep breath, and decide to finish my own meal in peace and quiet at the now-empty table.

While I am eating, my daughter, followed by my son, crawls back into the dining room.  I'm still annoyed, so I ignore them.  They giggle.  They crawl under the table to the high chairs.  I continue eating.  I hear, "Nom nom" so I glance under the table to find my children eating their bite-sized food off the floor.  I close my eyes for a moment of sanity, trying to decide if the five-second rule is actually important or not.  My daughter is serious about her meal selection, finding shriveled peas from the day before under the potted plant.  My son thinks the whole thing is hysterical until I turn around to find him joyfully splashing in the giant puddle he created by upending the cats' water bowl.  How did he get there so fast?

Eating with toddlers is a blend of aggravation and humor.  I have tried different strategies.  Ignoring the problem makes it worse because my children think it's funny to make a mess.  Addressing the problem directly makes it worse because it provides desired attention.  So now I praise.  Every. Single. Bite.  It begins with my son's first catapulted splat.  I turn to my daughter and say, "I LOVE how you are putting your food in your mouth and chewing it!  YAY!"  I clap, she smiles, and she exaggerates her next bite to make sure I'm looking.  My son watches this exchange, and puts the next bite of food in HIS mouth.  I say to my son, "I LOVE how you are putting the food in your mouth!"  My daughter looks at him and claps, too.  When she looks away he lobs more food onto the floor, and we start over.

Today, my daughter requires a cheerleading squad to eat appropriately, and when one is not provided she pretends to discard her food to the floor, then quickly pops the food in her mouth and smiles sweetly at me.  She claps and cheers for herself every few bites and expects me to join in.  (If I fail to notice when she is finished, she will still deftly drop the rest of her meal overboard.)  My son continues to perfect his catapult, unless, of course, I have given him tiny bites of scrambled eggs, pancakes, waffles, or grilled cheese.  These are the only foods currently deemed edible by his tender palate.  All other nourishment I sweep up off the dining room floor after mealtimes, just in case my children decide to crawl back later for a snack.

Parenting with Migraine

I open my eyes to an icepick pulse reverberating through the right side of my skull.  I feel the ache deep in my shoulder blade, the stiffness in my neck.  Pound, pound, pound.  It is sharp; I can focus on little else.  My heart beats in my head, each beat sending ripples of agony behind my eye, through my forehead, the base of my skull.

Another migraine.  I slowly turn my head to the left, waves of nausea rising in my stomach and throat.  My wife has already left for work.  The sunlight in the window is blinding.  The children's morning babble through the baby monitor screams through my ears.  I turn my head slowly to the right, feeling the ache of cramps in my lower abdomen.  Where did I leave my medication?  It's not on the side of the bed.  It's in the bathroom.  The kids are safe in their cribs - they will have to wait.

I roll out of bed and gasp as I stand upright, looking through static.  Keeping one hand on the wall for stability, I shuffle to the bathroom, fight the seal off my pill cover, and swallow it.  I stumble blindly to the kitchen to grab the ice packs from the freezer, and collapse back in bed, icing both the back and front of my head.  Twenty minutes, I think, pound pound pound.  The medicine will kick in and I will be able to function in twenty minutes.  Just breathe.  Twenty minutes later, my head icy and numb, I crawl out of bed.  I can feel my heart beating in my head without the pain; the nausea has subsided.  I take a quick and necessary shower, and realize I will be reading no books to the children today.  The static aura makes focusing nearly impossible.  Has it been an hour?  No.  Cannot yet take the next medication.  The kids are still waiting for me and they are getting fussy.

I go into their room and act fake-cheerful, my soft voice way too loud in my head.   God,  I hope my children do not inherit these migraines.  I did read that migraines sometimes skip a generation, but I don't want my grandchildren to have this disease either.  No music this morning.  Mama's very tired.  In fact, Mama wants to go back to sleep.  I smelled that dirty diaper halfway down the hallway.  I gag and almost throw up while changing it.  Got to make breakfast.  Can you play for a few minutes by yourselves?

I manage to scramble two eggs and throw blueberries and cheerios on their plates.  My children are happy, energetic, loud.  I grab my computer and find children's songs on youtube.  They stare quietly at the screen while they eat.  There will be a lot of screen time today.  Guilt gnaws at me, remembering that I didn't want my children to watch TV at least until 2 years old.  I take my second medication and close my eyes.

I've had migraines since I was a child.  As I have gotten older they have gotten worse.  My new Florida neurologist diagnosed me with intractable migraine, a sort of chronic migraine that continues day after day.  Two or three glorious days each month I am migraine free.  The rest of the time I feel the migraine in my body one way or another.  The migraine pain overwhelms me one or two times each week - the sluggishness, nausea, aura, and headaches fluctuate in moments throughout the day.  Most days I sport a chronic headache that ranges on the pain scale from 0 to 10 somewhere between 1 and 3.  I'm so used to it by now that it's like background noise in my head.  On my severe migraine days, I beat myself up for being a "bad mother."  I put the kids down for longer naps.  They have way too much screen time.  I sit on the couch near them and stare off into space, leaving them to entertain themselves and crawl out of the room without my awareness.  My wife reassures me that I'm a great mother and this is completely acceptable, that I need to take care of myself first, and a little extra screen time won't hurt them.  I wonder if my children notice that some days Mama has entirely checked out?

Thank goodness for medications!  It took me ten years to discover this medication, which if I take it at the onset of a migraine stops the migraine completely in 20 minutes.  It's too late, however, for it to work if I wake up already in the midst of a migraine attack.  For those times my neurologist has provided me with a system: one hour after the first medication I take another, and, if necessary, two hours later I take two more.  By then I'm physically exhausted but functional, focused, and pain-free.  My emergency room visits have ceased completely with this system - the "migraine cocktail" of drugs given to me in the emergency room to treat severe migraine I can provide myself at home with a different set of medications.

Which brings me back to my guilt-ridden angst.  How will my migraines impact my children?  How can I prevent my illness from becoming a limiting force in their lives?  I already avoid perfumes and colognes, eat nothing with MSG (often labeled "natural flavors"), avoid all soy and soy products and vinegars and vinegar products, but I cannot control weather changes and hormone changes and other physiological changes in my body that also contribute to migraine.  Living my life means dealing with migraines.  Living with migraines means that sometimes, too many times, I am out of commission. Sometimes, too many times, I am unable to be the mother I want to be for my children.

Swim Lessons

My daughter has a healthy wariness for her own safety when in the pool.  She loves to float in a tube and splash, but she does not like to get her face wet.  Even in the bathtub we have to help her relax before she smiles and rolls around in two inches of water.  She is just as excited as her brother to put on a swimsuit but she needs a little encouragement to actually get in and enjoy herself.

My son comes alive in the water.  He laughs, kicks, and splashes, and has absolutely no fear.  His movements are awkward and joyous.  He does not want to be held, so he wriggles in my arms and face-plants into the water.  To my ongoing astonishment he comes up smiling while choking and coughing.  The more time we spend in the pool and in the bathtub, the more he is trying to move during the day.  I fully attribute my son's motivation to move and crawl now to his time in the pool, an unofficial water therapy.  I also believe that without our intense supervision he could easily drown.  Thus we decided to invest in swimming lessons for both of our children.

Infant Aquatic Safety came highly recommended.  An instructor meets us at our condo pool four mornings per week and spends ten minutes with each child in the pool.  The program promises that after 4-6 weeks the children will not panic if they fall into a body of water.  They will be able to flip onto their backs by themselves and swim to the stairs.  

The instructor and I spoke in depth on the phone before she accepted our enrollment.  She wanted me to understand that there would be tears.  Lots of tears.  I would not be permitted to hold or console my child for the full ten minute lesson.  She would keep my child from looking in my direction, and if necessary, I would have to hide.  She explained that she needed their full attention for the full ten minutes and that they would likely scream until they mastered the skills she was teaching them.  All children cry, I thought, how bad could it be?  I accepted those terms and we started the lessons.

I didn't realize how traumatic the lessons were going to be for my daughter.  She went from loving the pool to bawling going near it.  She screams hysterically for the entire ten minutes; yet after one week I see her independently put her head in the water, flip onto her back, and float with the instructor's support while she howls.  The lessons are clearly working!  But she is so upset...which fills me with angst.  I have to pry my daughter off my chest and hand her to the instructor, while she shrieks real tears and clutches me with all her strength.  Are we pushing our daughter too soon?  Are we damaging her by insisting she learn how to be safe in the water before she is emotionally ready?  I busy myself taking care of my son and playing with him out of the pool so my daughter in the pool does not see my face.  But I worry about her emotional health the entire time.

Our son cries, too, but they are angry cries.  He is angry because he cannot do what HE wants to do in the water during his lesson.  As soon as the lesson is over he is smiling and splashing again.

This past weekend my wife and I took the kids to the pool.  Our daughter sobbed and clung to us the entire 15 minutes we were in the water.  Our son repeatedly practiced putting both hands on the top step while keeping his head up above the water.  Then our son tried to crawl out of the pool!

Given this drastic change in our children's behavior in the water, my wife and I discussed whether to discontinue our daughter's swim lessons.  After some debate, we decided that it would be worse to stop while our daughter associates a negative (for her) experience with water, instead of continuing the lessons and having her master the skills necessary for both her safety and her confidence in the water.

Truthfully, we are counting on the accuracy of research which says children do not remember events before age three.  We decided that teaching our children how not to drown is more important than some tears in the long run; we are trusting that after four weeks the crying will stop as promised.  Our son is learning important skills so he can be safe in his favorite place.  Our daughter is unhappily mastering the same important life-long skills.  Why?  It is ultimately for her own benefit and our peace of mind.

Each morning, I wonder if we are doing the right thing.  Every day, I tell her how proud of her I am as I see her flip and float with the instructor.  Even so, her cries break my heart as I watch from the side of the pool.