C has been refusing to eat solid foods for the past two months. I tried consistently for several days when he was right around six months old. At first, he was curious–would get super excited to see the spoon and would express his enthusiasm by a little hyper-ventilating-type breathing. He would take a couple of bites and move the cereal around in his mouth, swallow a bit and drool out the rest. He seemed to be gravely disappointed that the stuff on the spoon was not quite the treat he had been expecting. Then, even novelty seemed to wear off and C decided that the taste of the food was really just intolerable. He would meet each spoonful with an awful grimace and would push out his tongue along with whatever food I had managed to get in there. So, after a few brief encounters with rice cereal, baby oatmeal, green beens, and carrots, we decided to take a break. I have tried again every now and then to see if his feelings towards food might have changed–but no. He would have none of it. He was evidently perfectly content with milk, thank you very much.
Yesterday, however, I tried again. This time, I brought out the sweet potatoes….I thought I’d try to give him a little extra motivation. Perhaps the child has a sweet tooth; perhaps he had just had a happy dream about sweet potatoes; perhaps I had managed to warm them to a proper temperature. Regardless of what made the light bulb go on in his little head, it certainly went on. When I put the spoon to his mouth, he began to grimace out of habit, changed his mind, swallowed, and opened up for more….and more….and more. One would think he’d been eating for weeks. He looked like an old pro—a hungry old pro.
My son is a thumb-sucker–a trait I find absolutely adorable. I am not yet entertaining the idea of how on earth we will break him of this habit when the time arises. Right now, I am perfectly content with his self-soothing habit of choice. The thumb-sucking started just around the time of the famed sleeping through the night. I am absolutely convinced that the two coincide. Thus, in addition to him looking so very cute when he sucks his thumb, I also appreciate the habit for very practical reasons. Well, back to eating. He has begun, between bites of sweet potato, to stick his thumb in his mouth for a quick suck….between every bite. Sweet potato, thumb, sweet potato, thumb. This is hilarious to me. It is also super messy. The sweet potato in the mouth gets on the thumb which comes out of the mouth and onto something to turn that something a delightful shade of orange before going back into the mouth and collecting more gooey potato. The end result is a full, happy, orange baby wearing an orange bib and sitting in an orange high chair.
