Help me feed my toddler

amother

Aquamarine

Sun, Jul 01 2018, 10:19 pm

amother wrote:

We do have some leftovers, which I either send to family, or end up discarding. I eat a LOT- the equivalent of 2 people.
I also grew up with very limited food (my mother made exactly 1 piece of salmon etc per person) and I cook a lot, going to the opposite extreme.

from this thread

ouch, I'm afraid this will be me. I have a complex about cooking - I was teased mercilessly as a child for having my head in the clouds and told I wouldn't be able to cook. Turns out, ofc I can cook, but dh is a very small eater and subsists on coffee and bissli. I'm super healthy and on a very specific diet, and am generally happier starving than cooking, so ours is definitely not the home with always tons to eat.

I was able to get away with it when baby was younger and didn't eat so much solids. But now he's 1.5y and today (The fast day), when there was not really food around, he was HUNGRY. Every day I feel like I'm scrambling to make food for him but especially today. (Disclaimer - I know people who literally don't feed their kids - I'm not there yet!)

The other day I pulled an entire lunch out of the freezer to send to babysitter and felt super functional (tuna patties, pancakes healthy oatmeal cookies, healthy oatmeal bites) but I also knew he wouldn't actually eat most of it.

I need ideas for meals and snacks, and also for what to keep around the house so it's always stocked. He's not a picky eater but he does go through phases.

Breakfast - always a fight since he stopped eating oatmeal and dh does breakfast and always ends up giving snacks like bamba and pretzels. I tried pancakes. Lately its scrambled egg, cottage cheese and berries or strawberries.

Lunch - always a scrambled egg, sometimes with leftover salmon or tuna patties (he started refusing them). rice pasta or rice. steamed broccoli.

Dinner - whatever I'm making, if I made it in time. Usually chicken with roasted veggies like beets, sweet potato fries.

Snacks - yogurt pouches (that's a treat), applesauce pouches, cereal, puffins, pretzels, rice cakes.

I need more ideas. And more variety. And more vegetables! It's ironic bc I literally eat only vegetables but a lot of what I make he won't eat.

I feel like with more kids in the house, there's more to eat, but when it's just us 3 it's so hard to always have something ready.

penguin

Sun, Jul 01 2018, 11:11 pm

If it often happens that your dinner isn't ready when your little one needs to eat, start making extra so you have something from the previous night to offer him.

If you can find some quick things he likes you can stock them in the freezer. E.g. Dr. Pragers vegetable bites and I think maybe fish sticks? are pretty healthy and can be baked in a toaster oven pretty quickly. You'll just have to try a few to see which ones appeal to him.

amother

Lavender

Mon, Jul 02 2018, 2:18 am

amother wrote:

He's offered everything. The problem is that we don't really sit for meals, he's the only one eating at 6:30 breakfast and 5:30 supper. So I feel like I have to always be pulling food out for him. At the shabbos table it's way easier.

It's very healthy for the family to sit together daily. Even if you only drink tea or munch on veggies, why don't you and hubby try to have a half hour a day to sit with your child while he eats? It is so positive for the family!

cinnamon

Mon, Jul 02 2018, 3:21 am

How do you get your 1.5 y.o to eat all that?
all my 17 month old will eat is yogurt, applesauce, oatmeal, cucumbers, tomatoes, grapes, pasta and rice.
He refuses all other vegtables might take one or two bites of other fruits.
He won't eat eggs or tuna or bread or cheese.
He'll take one bite of chicken if it's on the spoon with rice or pasta after one bite he takes it off the spoon.

This is what he eats in a day:

breakfast is a yogurt (sometimes two) and a slice of bread with cheese or somtimes chocolate spread which he doesn't eat but I keep offering cause I need him to eat bread!

lunch is a jar of apple sauce with oatmeal

supper is the starch I make for everyone else (rice or pasta usually), chicken of some kind and a cooked veggy which I offer but he doesn't eat.

In between he eats grapes, cucumbers, tomatoes and bamba/bisli/whatever junk the older kids have that they share with him.

Teomima

Mon, Jul 02 2018, 3:29 am

At that age I made tons of mini quiche-like "muffins". Eggs, cubes of cheese, cubes steamed veggies, baked in a muffin tin. Easy to then freeze and pull out one or two at a time. Great meal for little kids. Personally I'd be very wary of giving so many packaged snacks to a child that age, you risk them developing an unhealthy relationship with food and becoming very dependant on junk. Instead of a packaged snack, try cutting up some cherry tomatoes, or put some canned beans in a bowl, or some cubed cheese. These things are also quick, easy finger foods, but much healthier than packaged snacks/junk food.

Rappel

Mon, Jul 02 2018, 4:05 am

I have definitely been there! I'm pretty disorderly, and the idea of sitting down at an organized meal never happened - until my eldest became a toddler

I'm just going to echo everyone else here: the best "spice" for my toddler is companionship! He eats if I sit with him. If I don't....nibbles, at best. Breakfast has become our ritual: I make him whatever I'm making him (pita pizza, bowl of rice crispies, or cottage cheese and cucumber sticks), and I make myself a cup of green tea, since it's usually too early for me to be hungry. Then we sit, chat, learn words like "hot" and "cucumber," practice cutting up the food, use the cucumber slices as spoons to scoop up the cottage cheese (note: anything that involves dipping is magic to him. I don't remember how we discovered this, but take note of any sensory play your son loves to do, and try to incorporate it into his meals). After all that, he tends to eat a lot more, and start the day happier, and I do too.

Some other meal tricks:
- go bite-for-bite with him. "My turn, your turn" works great for keeping it going down.
-switch off feeding him and letting him feed himself (while you stay there and keep chatting with him)
-let him help you prepare his meal.
- show him options - "do you want an apple, or a pear?" And wait until he indicates the one he wants. Communication and the power of choice will thrill him.
- eat healthy, but only to a point - he's running around all day, and he needs calories to burn, so it's important that he eats well. I shamelessly drizzle silan on cereal or oatmeal, use store bought tomato sauce on his pizzas, oil and salt his quinoa without fear. He needs all the calories he can get, and so long as I'm careful to incorporate the vitamins and minerals he needs in to his diet, I'm not worried. And in order for my son to want to eat, it needs to tastesweet to him, and/or have a sauce. Figure out what makes your son love a food - maybe a certain shape, with peels/without peels - and go for that.

Behatzlacha!