First of all, we were the ones who let her have her pasta and veggies in a tomato sauce - so we kind of deserved the mess after she decided to go ahead and play peek-a-book with her dirty hands.
After only three days of daycare she already got a monster cold and basically has been a serious snot machine since Wednesday night. So really, who cares about getting food all on her face and in her hair at this point?
My Mom has a picture of me about this age, eating spaghetti and I pretty much look the same - sauce all over the place. So I e-mailed these pictures to her with the caption: "Does this remind you of anyone?". They had a good laugh. Apparently when I was a kid spaghetti was my favourite thing to eat in the whole world and I would go to town whenever a plate of it was put in front of me. One of my Aunts said that when I was a kid and had something that I liked to eat I would be so serious about eating it, getting every last bite to the point of licking my fingers. She said she never saw a kid enjoy a meal so much. She said I just loved to eat. I wonder if that is why I have such a hard time putting down the oreo cookies after just one bite. Maybe I have always been like this.
This is one said picture of me in all my pigging out glory as a child (eating some kind of chocolate pie - chocolate is another one of my weaknesses):
Seriously though, now that I have a little one of my own I am often thinking about the type of eating habits that I want to instil in my children and I am often paranoid that I don't even know what's appropriate eating for an almost one year old. I mean, up until now, we have relied on breast milk (and more recently formula) for her main source of nutrition. The table food she was eating was more like my family physician said: "Solids before one is just for fun". But now I am extra stressed by the fact that I will have to increasingly look to table foods to nurture my little girl.
I mean, I have been doing diets and what not for years and I don't even know what is normal anymore. My generation has been so conditioned to look at every food label and count every calorie. For example, when I go to pick out yogurt, I cringe at the idea of buying natural yogurt with 3.5% MF in it because I am so used to buying fat free - even though I know that babies need some healthy fats for nourishment. I know that all the fat free foods aren't always the best for you, but when you are trying to shed pounds it's what you go for.
And then there is the major guilt when I get lazy sometimes and give her something like canned soup (because of the sodium) or grilled cheese (because of processed cheese slices). Then the other day at daycare they said they gave her Lucky Charms and I was like, "What the hell?". It felt like she was fed poison. And yet is it really that bad? And don't even get me started on trying to get this girl to eat vegetables. Right now the only ones she will eat are cherry tomatoes or cucumbers. Seriously. She used to love carrots, zucchini, broccoli, etc. Now she turns her nose at it.
In the last year, I have really been trying to get away from diets that only give short term results and try to just go with whole foods. But old habits die hard. And then there is also the fact that since I have been pregnant I allow myself dessert at family dinners, and hot chocolate at the coffee shop with my friends. I have the odd take out meal and have been making more processed foods for convenience (like frozen shepherd's pie, for example). I kind of use my pregnancy as this excuse to let things slide here and there. So it seems these days it's always one extreme or the other. Not a good thing. And so I often worry that I am going to start setting a bad example for my daughter. But I also don't want her growing up just watching her mother obsess over every little thing that she cooks and eats either. Where is the happy medium? It's what I've been trying to figure out lately.
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