Food Frustrations

‘Frustrating’, is the word with Rachel. She is in the habit of getting me to make her things she doesn’t actually want. To be fair to her, she does actually attempt to get them herself (with predictable results) but clearly the enjoyment is in the opening, preparing or cooking, not in the eating of the food.

They all do it sometimes; opening a banana and deciding they don’t like it, that sort of thing, but some days she goes a little bit too far.

Yesterday morning, she got out of the fridge some leftovers of tuna sauce, rice and vegetables, put it in the microwave and turned it on.  Apart from the fact she obviously doesn’t realise that she is still only 2 and probably too small to be safely operating the microwave, it was 7.30 am.

Now, I am not one to put my preconceptions of what one should have for breakfast upon my children, when they clearly have other ideas. So I thought, fair enough, I’ll maybe stop her heating up the whole Tupperware container of it, but she can have a little bowl of it to eat. It is quite a healthy breakfast after all, even if it didn’t appeal to me. In the event, it didn’t appeal to her either – she wouldn’t even sniff it and the other children complained of the smell when they came down for their cereal.

This morning, Emilia got up first and tried her hand at making the porridge. What she didn’t realise, is that it expands, a lot, and by the time I rescued it and added enough water and milk to her quantities to make it the right consistency, it was a vat of porridge. Good effort though. Rachel didn’t want to eat that either -unless it was 2/3 syrup – which I wouldn’t allow.

She asks me to open her an orange, I do, and she won’t eat it. She opens a yogurt, eats a spoonful and leaves the rest, and I can’t help but go round all day finishing everything she’s rejected. It works out be the equivalent of a meal in itself.  

She likes to ask for lunch at breakfast time, and breakfast before bed. She went to a friend’s for tea recently and came back telling me that she’d had a lovely dinner party.

The main thing is that she likes to help herself, and I am all for independence but when she walks around with open bottles of squash to make herself a drink of mostly concentrate, or staggers up the stairs into my bedroom for assistance with a 4 pint container of milk and a cup, I start to feel maybe it is not such a good thing.