Wednesday 24 July 2013

Phoenix update

I realise that I haven't actually written about Phoenix for a while, so I thought I would give you a quick update. Phoenix is becoming more and more 3 years old. By that I mean she is asserting her independence, becoming possessive of her belongings, becoming more wilful. All things you would expect of a 3 year old. She is the queen of diversion. I ask her to come to the table to eat and she jumps into her car and starts pretending to drive away. Or she goes to the couch and hides under the blanket or she goes to her reading tent and picks up a book.

We've had to finally pull out the ultimate threat when we sit her at the table and refuses to eat. Eat or the ipad goes away. And amazingly, it works! It is a beautiful threat, because she loves the ipad and we have fallen into the bad habit of letting her watch videos on it at the meal table because she will watch it and mindlessly eat. For most people this is a bad thing. Not for a kid with food issues. For a kid with food refusal tendencies, mindless eating is brilliant. It means that every day I get her to eat fruits and veggies. It feels like a giant victory. Until the time when we have to start weaning her off the ipad. That is not going to be pretty, let me tell you. For know it is fine. We finally have a kid that eats and we are going to bask in the glory of it as long as we can.

I sure hope it won't be a problem at preschool in September.

2 comments:

  1. Our problem with Anaya isn't getting her to eat, it's the fact that she is SOOOOO slow...give her an hour and she will finish her whole plate, but what will she do with the 10minute snack time at school? Glad you found a way to get Phoe to eat!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Phoenix is slow too, but she comes by it naturally, Mike is the slowest eater ever. And meal times are a very long affair in our household too. Yeah, snack time should be fun when they are in school.

      Delete