When we were pregnant, one of our neighbours told us to enjoy eating out at nice restaurants while we can, because we’d be eating at WhiteSpot for years. We scoffed at that – we were determined to take our child to eat out at other restaurants. Alas, how wrong we were.
Though we do take Aiden to other restaurants, it’s not as often as we expected. We tend to choose restaurants with a “homestyle” dining offering, since Aiden doesn’t seem to enjoy things like sushi or Thai food or fancy meals like seafood yet. He, instead, likes things such as pasta and sausage and burgers and fries.
I told myself pre-baby, “I won’t give my child fries,” but the reality is that any food a toddler chooses to consume is a good thing, and I’ll happily give him fries. We typically order a couple of menu items we know he’ll like which are healthy, and if he wants a few fries, that’s A-ok by me. For the most part, we don’t yet choose restaurants based on kids menus – Aiden prefers to eat our food than anything ordered for him anyway!
So, why do we eat at Whitespot? The menu is diverse, some of it healthy, and you know there’s always a free high chair. The price is decent for the food you receive. More than anything, though, it comes down to service. The food comes quickly, the wait service knows how to deal with kids, and we don’t feel guilty if Aiden needs to walk around before his food arrives. The food isn’t always perfect (sometimes we get lukewarm fries) and going during a shift change is not a good time, but WhiteSpot has made loyal customers of us.
Aiden is more interested in sorting sugar packets than in colouring, but I know that the kid-friendly atmosphere, and someday the pirate packs, will keep us coming back for years.
As Aiden has become less and less a baby and more and more a toddler, his personality and tastes have changed. That’s particularly true with food. He’s much more of a picky eater now. And, to make matters worse, he HATES being dirty.
Finger foods that make him dirty – pasta with sauce, for example – are now a fork food. By necessity. If Aiden gets food on his hands, he’ll whine and complain and gesture to be cleaned up. This is a particularly tiresome issue and one I’m not pleased has emerged.
When Aiden eats a liquidy food, like yogurt, he gets messy. He mostly insists on handling forks and spoons on his own, only getting assistance with the scooping part. However, he sometimes takes his time between the scoop and his mouth – food gets flung everywhere, drips everywhere, and makes a mess of everything.
If too much mess gets on his tray, this upsets Aiden. But his hands getting dirty is the worst. He can tolerate a little bit of mess on his face, probably because he can’t see it, but not always. Usually a messy food will end up frustrating him to the point where he wants to stop eating. Since some of his favourite foods are messy, this leaves us with an annoying problem.
What I want to know is… how did WE end up with a child who is a neat freak?? Seriously?
Aiden has been on finger foods for a long time now. As Jessica demonstrated in her post, it’s now recommended you move from chunky textures to finger foods relatively quickly now, avoiding puree altogether. While this has been great advice for us, and Aiden has taken to it easily, I did have trouble introducing him to bigger finger foods: things he had to take bites out of.
He’s been biting into crackers and cookies and toast for a long time, but if I offered him longer veggies or fruit, he’d often try to stuff the whole thing into his mouth or spit them out / reject them. I’ve noticed that he’s been taking smaller and smaller bites of food lately, so I thought that perhaps his biting technique was more purposeful. Turns out, that’s true.
This week I introduced Aiden to taking bites out of soft fruits, cucumber fingers and cheese. He has been loving it!
Today, Aiden hit many milestones. Aside from standing up from the floor for the very first time, he also had three food milestones: drinking solo from a cup, using a fork, and having whole milk.
Aiden has been drinking from a cup with meals for 6 months, but never solo. He showed no interest in holding the cup. Watching him mimic drinking when playing with stacking cups, I knew for some time that he should be capable of drinking solo. He just never wanted to try. Today, instead of handing him the cup, I put it on his tray and encouraged him to pick it up. He spilled a bit, but successfully drank from it. Of course, then he washed his hands in the water and threw chunks of his food into the cup.
As for the fork, I’d been wanting Aiden to feed himself for some time. However, much of his meal is finger food and the stuff I spoon feed is too messy for Aiden’s eager attempts to place the spoon in his mouth. I’m not sure why I never thought to offer a fork before, but he was perfect with it! I just had to spear the food and he did the rest. Seemed to have fun doing it, too!
Today I also introduced whole milk into Aiden’s diet. Although I’m still breastfeeding, and not because of what my doctor said, I decided to introduce milk after one or both naps, just as a nice way to supplement his diet. I also find that an afternoon snack can ruin his dinner, so this way I’m curbing his hunger just enough, but not too much. He loved the milk – lots and lots of “mmm” sounds. I tried the milk in our Safe Sippy, which Aiden still doesn’t know to tip up to drink from – so I had to lay him down.
Though our diaper-bag cup is still the Safe Sippy, and though we use a normal cup for mealtime, in our play area I wanted a cup that Aiden could pick up and drink from whenever he wanted to.
On impulse, I bought the Mighty Grip Flip Straw Cup from Munchkin. Though I would have preferred stainless steel, I thought this was an inexpensive way to start off until Aiden could figure out how to hold the Safe Sippy on its own (trickier because it needs to be tilted up).
Aiden loves straws, so this cup was right up his alley. At 9 months, he had no problem picking up the cup and drinking from it. If it slips, he figures out how to maneuver it around until it’s straw-end up. Pretty neat that he can do all that!
Purchased from London Drugs
