Womze - Cross Cultural Parenting

New year pledge #1
I will cook varied and healthy meals for my kids.  I will provide meals that stimulate their taste buds and promote good eating habits. 

The challenge
My 5 year old is a notoriously picky eater.  Or non-eater, depending on how you look at it.  She drinks a lot of milk and likes to snack on crackers, gummies and chips.  I try to make those unavailable but she appears just fine with milk only.  With some prodding, she would eat a few pieces of sausage, fish sticks or other highly processed foods.  I had allowed this to go on for too long due to the convenience of said processed foods.

How did we fall into such poor eating habits
I don’t really know.  At one, when she was newly introduced to adult fare, she voraciously dug into everything.  And by everything, I mean iyan and egusi, beans cooked in palm oil, rice, moin-moin, etc - all Nigerian foods, spicy and hot.  A lot of kids refuse to eat these foods, but not my Darling Angel - she gobbled it all up.  That was at age one.  Next thing I can remember, she was turning it all down and would only eat sausage or pancake or fish sticks or chicken nuggets or fries.  (Never a combination though, just one at any one time.)

Why the history?  Well, whatever I did wrong, I do not want to repeat it with Baby Brother.  His appetite currently exceeds his sister’s when she was one.  He too is gobbling everything down and has a well rounded tummy as evidence.  While I on one hand wonder when (or if) it will be necessary to start taking precautions against childhood obesity, I also wonder if he will suddenly turn away from food and adopt the picky lifestyle.

Since I can’t think of anything I did to cause Darling Angel’s aversion to food, I figure the key may be in what I did not do vs. what I did.

And one thing I did not do 4 years ago was to ensure that there was sufficient variety in our meals.  I just stuck to and repeatedly offered the foods that worked. 

Hope
As I write this, I am not yet sure what form our meal variety will take.  But I hope that Darling Angel’s new-found 5-year old maturity can be leveraged to convince her to try new foods.  I hope that she will discover or rediscover foods that she likes.  I hope that Baby Brother continues to have a good appetite and grows up eating healthy.  I hope that the effort helps me to keep up a healthy diet myself.  Hubby likes his staple naija foods but I’m hoping he joins in and tries some variety too.

When I wrote about the Gerber pancake recipe, I found it amusing.  I wondered how a baby could eat a stack of pancakes.  I’m amused no more.  I know my baby can eat a stack of pancakes.  Maybe not a stack, but one or two pancakes.  At almost 9 months, he’s turning his nose at baby foods.  He wants to eat what the ‘big people’ eat but I fear that isn’t good enough for baby.

I need to pay extra close attention to what he eats and ensure that he’s getting proper nutrition.  So if he won’t eat his cereal, perhaps he can get the same cereal from pancake.  I grabbed the box of cereal to read the recipe I had previously scoffed at and proceeded to make a stack of pancakes which I planned to freeze so I could microwave one at a time for baby’s breakfast.

Note that recipes have quantities for a reason.  This one called for 1/4 cup of Gerber rice cereal, added to pancake mix.  This recipe is at back of the Gerber mixed cereal, I didn’t have rice cereal at hand and figured the mixed cereal would do.  It didn’t say how much pancake mix but I guess 1 cup, enough to make 6-8 standard size pancakes.  I look on the side panel of my Hungry Jack pancake mix and see 600mg sodium, 25% daily value.  I decide that’s too much sodium for my baby and decide I’ll make the pancake from scratch.

From scratch, I’ll make a real healthy, baby worthy pancake.  Low sodium.  I don’t have a measure of the sodium in my plain white flour but it’s got to be less than 600mg.  If I had whole grain flour, I would use that, but I don’t.  No egg whites, none of that allergenic stuff.  More Gerber cereal, less flour.  Baby formula, not the 1% lowfat in my refrigerator.  I stir in a jar of 1st Foods peach…Perfect. 

As I threw small scoops of baby-worthy pancake mixture on the hot pan, I thought of how I would blog about this.  I would share my baby-worthy pancake recipe on the blog, act like I was a really smart mom.  I look at the neat stack of pancakes - they’re not perfect circles like the store-bought frozen pancakes (yes, my daughter eats those), but it is a neat stack nevertheless.  I should grab my camera, take a near-professional photo to accompany my blog post.  I wonder what the pancake tastes like.  I’d take one little taste.  Yuck!  Gummy, sticky, wet on the inside.  Tastewise, not terrible.  But texture?  Yuck!  It will take some doing to get this down baby’s throat.  Smart mommy blog post gone before it’s ever written.

No pancake for baby’s breakfast.  We some cereal and fruit, our former staple but he keeps averting his head.  After a brief game of dodge-the-spoon, I give in to cheerios.

Later I develop the bright idea to toast the pancakes, dry them out to make them easier for baby to chomp on.  I look for the pancakes but the stack is gone.  I ask Hubby if he saw my neat stack of pancakes.  He had handed them out to the older kids.  “You ate those?”, I asked my 6 year old nephew.  “They were delicious”, he declared.  It just goes to show that if I had followed the Gerber instructions - quarter cup of cereal added to pancake mix, we could have had pancakes for the whole family.

This week Baby Brother did not seem overly interested in his dinners, whether cereal or the varieties of jarred stage 2 dinners.  We even tried stage 3 mushy dinners with tiny floating chunks but his response was the same.  Perhaps it’s because he’s teething.  He’s had a fever, maybe he’s fighting off something and is experiencing a loss of appetite. But even before then, his interest in food seemed to have decreased.  He still drank his milk so I wasn’t worried.

When I sat him in his seat at the dinner table and cooed and cooed, trying to get him to eat some mixed cereal and fruit combo and he stubbornly resisted by averting his mouth from the spoon, I concluded that he was not hungry, that he had no appetite.   So when Adoring Father joined us at the table with a plate of ogbonno (a West African soup) and Baby Brother practically leaped out of his seat towards daddy’s plate, I was surprised.  “Could he want that?”, I wondered aloud.  Adoring Father gave him a chunk of something from the soup and the boy mashed it down with his gums and two teeths and called for more.  I was shocked.  Not because I can’t stand ogbonno (it has a strong odor aroma) but because I didn’t realize an 8 month old baby could be that selective.

Could he be bored with baby food?  Could he be ready for bigger-boy culinary delights?  Could I really serve him from our dinner plate?  I hadn’t experienced this with his older sister as she ate within my dictated guidelines till age one when I removed all restrictions and fed her from anything we ate.  I remember she was very delighted to join us at dinner but she was one year old.  I didn’t have to worry about sharing an omelet with her since egg whites were now okay.  And I was a lot less worried about her choking on food bits.

Now that I know that baby’s not “not hungry” when he turns his mouth away from his chicken noodle dinner, macaroni and cheese (which was a favorite), sweet pototoes in pureed form, I’m trying to cook baby-friendly meals that he can eat.  I found a baby food guide at WholesomeBabyFood.com and I improvised with foods I have at hand.

So far he’s done very well with my home cooked meals.  He’s cleaned up his bowls and ‘asked’ for seconds.  We’ve had:

• Spinach rice - very soft boiled rice, added a dash of leftover stew (tomatoes, onions and peppers), crumbled spinach into it and crumbled in a boiled egg yolk.
• Egg noodles - Noodles boiled very soft, added dash of leftover stew, added a crumbled egg yolk.
• Cheesy egg noodles - Noodles boiled very soft, added mozarella cheese

I need to go grocery shopping with baby in mind and expand our food repertoir while he’s very interested lest he grows up to be a picky eater like his sister is (or like I was once).