She'll Do What She Wants When She Wants To Do It

I never claimed to be the quickest Pikachu in the pokedeck, so it shouldn't be a surprise that Mila is already two years old and I just now figured out the issue with her eating and stuff. Better late than never, I suppose!

If you've been around for a while, you probably remember that Her Highness wouldn't take bottles. That's fine and dandy, except for the part where she spends her days at daycare. She made it through the first year of her life essentially refusing to eat unless I was around. She got by on less than 4 ounces of milk each day for a while.

And there's your answer as to why she's so tiny. Still. Because she only eats when she decides she's going to eat.

While the original pickiness was all about the food delivery system, now it's seemingly something else. Mila will eat breakfast 2, 3, and sometimes even 4 times. There have been many days this week she shoveled a peach into her face, chased it with a waffle, and then still ate an entire breakfast sandwich from that fast food place that makes people feel like judging parenting skills and stuff.

STOP JUDGING ME.

Ahem.

She does okay at lunch, allegedly. We send a bunch of little bowls of food and they mostly come back empty. Somebody is eating it, I suppose.

And then there is dinner.

FORGET IT. Mila cannot be convinced to sit nicely and eat dinner for anything. You'll find Donald Trump holding hands with a Mexican and a Muslim while singing Kumbaya before you'll get Mila to eat a reasonable dinner. Tonight she took a pouch of yogurt, decorated the table with it, and then licked a spoonful of the yogurt before declaring herself "All done."

That was an improvement over every other day this week.

In the car before dinner, however, a different thing happens. A few days this week, I happened to have snacks. Okay, so one night I had dinner. I mean, I had "dinner" because "dinner" was a bag of chips. Look, sometimes you have to go straight from picking kids up to dropping kids off and there isn't time to get them to a restaurant or home in the middle. On those days, it sometimes works out that I grab things from a vending machine before running out of work. It's better that they get a snack than to try to have them wait for dinner when we get home after 8:00.

Just go with me on this. I've spent the last few years figuring it out, so I've already come to terms with the insanity that is giving a kid chips when it's time for dinner.

So I had those snacks and so-called dinner, but I didn't expect Mila to care. I expected Alexis to make lots of happy noises as she inhaled the food, but Mila doesn't eat dinner.

It turns out Mila will eat pre-dinner. We're 4 for 4 with our recent attempts -- Mila will absolutely eat whatever I give her as long as it's before 5:30.

So, I figured it all out. Mila spent the first year of her life only eating from 5:30 pm to 8:00 am. Now she only eats from 8:00 am to 5:30 pm. Nothing has changed, really. She just flipped her schedule upside-down.

Until tomorrow, I'm sure. Now that I've figured this out, who knows what she will do next.

Comments

[Karl]

We had one of those. Breakfast, sure, lunch, maybe, dinner, get that stuff away from me. We tried to press the issue a couple times, but she discovered that she could projectile-barf on demand. So, dinner was a glass of milk, the larger the better. We finally gave up and we'd put a morsel of dinner on her plate to ignore, just in case that particular day she was starving. This went on until she was a teen, as I recall. She eats now (at age 30!).