Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Food idiosyncrasies

Matthew eats only the filling of the Oreo. He twists it open (or Jason or I twist it for him), then he puts it in his mouth and sucks off the filling, the spits back out the cookie. Usually he leaves the sucked on cookies on the counter or table. He prefers to place food that he doesn't want to eat beside his plate and not on it.

The boys got Dilly bars from Dairy Queen for the first time recently. After eating some of his Sam said, "I only like the chocolate part, the white part is too cold". Um, Sam, that would be the ice cream.

Matthew eats copious amounts of ketchup. He needs at least 1/4 cup for some chicken nuggets. Similar to his eating of Oreos, he dips his food (chicken nuggets, fries, carrot sticks, watermelon, whatever strikes him as needing ketchup) into ketchup, sucks the ketchup off and then dips some more. He will usually eventually eat whatever food he was using to scoop ketchup, but not until it has been thoroughly dipped.

Matthew eats butter off of bread. We've learned to spread it very thin so he actually eats the bread too as before he would eat off the buttered half of the bread and leave behind a very pitted, thin, unbuttered slice of bread.

Similar to the comment about ketchup above, the boys almost always have some form of dip on the plates. Ketchup, veggie dip, mayo, a variety of salad dressings, peanut butter, hummus...Usually there is only one dip, but sometimes as many as three. I've learned that kids are more likely to eat something or try something if they can dip it. Sam even prefers to eat his salad by hand, dipping each piece of lettuce into some salad dressing. Last week the kids and I went to the garden when after a few minutes Sam disappeared. I went inside to look for him and found him with a small piece of lettuce from the garden, and a large dallop of french dressing enjoy the firstfruits of the garden.

When we have tacos, Sam takes his tortilla a tears it into very small pieces--like less than a square centimeter in size and he won't eat any of it until he has torn his entire tortilla into this tiny pieces. So he ends up with a little pile of tortilla and then he proceeds, of course, to dip it into "lettuce dip" (aka french dressing).

Abby doesn't have anything to report yet, but I'm sure she will develop some interesting approaches to food in the near future. More on that later.

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