Eating at two years and one month

I have decided to do a series of updates on where Riku is at two years rather than one post as I suspect it would turn into a pretty long one! This is partly just to document things for myself so 6 months or a year from now I can look back and compare. Last post I looked at his talking, so now I'll update on the eating situation.

His eating is something that has improved so much compared to six months ago, and it is such a relief. The turning point was a few weeks after he was sick with suspected rotavirus, and although he had put back on a bit of the kilo he lost, it had been very slow, and he was being pickier than ever. One evening after half an hour of trying to cajole him into eating I decided out of desperation that I would try that old standard of frustrated parents: putting him to bed without any dinner if he wasn't going to eat what I had made for him. I felt very mean, but I took him upstairs and put him in his cot and left him for about 30 seconds. I then went back in and asked him if he would like to eat his dinner now, and got a tearful yes, and he actually ate the whole bowl, without any messing around at all.

The next day all I had to do was carry him up the stairs, and by the third day I only had to ask him whether he wanted to go to bed and he consented to eat his entire dinner! I'm not too happy I had to resort to that kind of tactics, but something had to give, he was eating very badly and is by far the skinniest of all the kids we know who are the same age. I was starting to be genuinely concerned that his growth or brain development would be affected by his poor eating- I'm not sure if it's really possible for that to happen as he wasn't starving, but most days I would say he ate a bare minimum and far too high a proportion of what he ate was sweet or salty foods that I gave him just so he would have eaten something. Not only has the amount of food he eats greatly increased, but he has now also started eating corn, carrots and broccoli quite happily- not whole, but mixed into other food, which is a major step ahead for us as well. As a result he is now up to 10.9 kg (from 10.5) after hardly gaining any weight at all for a good 6 months- hopefully he will hit 11 soon!

I do often have to feed him still, otherwise he will just get out of his high chair and run around, and the amount of different kinds of foods he will eat is still fairly limited compared to a lot of kids we know, but meal times are no longer the ordeal they were for most of last year, hopefully it keeps improving from here! :)

Helping to tear up lettuce for a salad for dinner one night last week just before he had a hair cut, which probably deserves its own blog post! He didn't eat the salad of course, we haven't got quite that far with him eating vegetables yet, but maybe one day!