15 month old eating...

[kfillmore]

I know this topic has been posted before but I REALLY need advice and maybe support or encouragment. Dealing with food is THE most stressful thing about...life, ha ha.

Anyway, I have a robust, energetic 15 month old girl. We buy organic foods from Whole Foods etc. We are not good at cooking (used to be before baby) or making interesting meals.

Our DD almost never will eat a vegetable. She picks out the tiniest pieces if they are mixed into something. We occasionally find a way she will eat them but it seems quite random (artichokes, potato pancakes, sometimes veg in soup)

DD lives on:
Frozen raspberries and blueberries
Goat/sheep yogurt
Some grains, especially rye but also rice and oats (we try to soak and she eats store bought 100% sourdough rye, she also eats ryvita crackers)

She will sometimes eat a kiwi, apple, pear, coconut, papaya seeds.
She likes raisins.
She likes soft goat cheese.
She loves eggs!
She will sometimes eat meat.
I have never given nuts because I am afraid of allergies (I have some digestive type allergies)
I still breastfeed her but I am not actually sure how much she really gets)

Does this seem like an OK diet?? I worry about vegetables but I read a post once about how it is hard for babies to digest veggies but I couldn't find it.
I also worry about iron, partly because we do have some lead in our apartment. And then I worry about general nutrition. I fear that maybe she seems healthy now but that lack of nutrition will show up later. I also worry about food allergies (we do have a NP that does AAT but it is $$ so we go slow) so am careful with yeast, wheat etc)

THANKS YOU for your thoughts, I need them!

[EdnaMarie]

Sounds great.

You offer, she decides. You might want to try dried dates with her, too. Mine loves dried fruits. Dried apricots (yes, with sulfur, you can get them without) are a favorite, too. I give her nuts in a controlled setting where she can't choke without me being right there.

We cook in iron cookware, which has been shown to reduce anemia significantly in several studies.

Allergies have been shown NOT to be related to the timing of introduction. They did a couple of studies. So go for it, gently, but don't worry that you'll make her allergic. At her age she can eat anything.

[JMJ]

My thought, and I could be wrong, is that it would be better if she ate more veggies, but you can't make her. I'd just continue putting them in front of her and let her know that she can eat them or not. With my own toddler about the same age, I'm also careful about how much fruit I give her because I don't want her to get addicted to sugar. I at least wait until some eggs, meat, or veggies make it in before fruit or bread ends up on her plate, and when fruit shows up, nothing else gets eaten.

[Llyra]

Well, it's not an ideal diet. But I don't know any toddlers who eat anything even approximating an idea diet, at least not regularly (I'm sure they exist, mind you.) and what you're describing is a zillion times better than what most toddlers are getting.

And she's still breastfeeding. Even if the actual quantity of milk is small, she's using it to fill in the nutritional "cracks."

I think the only sane way to feed toddlers is what the PP mentioned-- you offer, she decides. So you put a decently varied selection of foods in front of her, on a regular basis, and let her eat what her appetite guides her to. Make it as easy as possible to manage the foods you find most important. For example, my kids wouldn't eat greens. I worked out (silly me) that if I used lashings of butter, they'd eat just about anything.

Another thing I do is to serve the fruit for "dessert." Put the more nutritionally dense, more-likely-to-be-rejected stuff out first, while they're still very hungry. Then bring the more appealing stuff out later. Not as a "Reward" or anything like that. Just like, "oh, and now look what I have."

The veggies my kids were most willing to eat, at that age, were the yellow-orange ones. So we ate a lot of carrots, sweet potatoes, and winter squash. Again, we'd serve all of them like DROWING in butter, which really helps.

Sweet peas and beans are also easy for LOs to eat.

What I always did was to just make what I liked, and what was interesting for me to eat, and what I judged to be nutritionally best for me. And then I just let them pick at whatever appealed to them, from the choices I'd made. The problem with buying and offering special food for the LOs is that if they don't eat it, it goes to waste, or you wind up feeling low because of having gone to all that trouble only to have it rejected.

What about fish? My kids love salmon salad; that was a big hit during the toddler years. Or mixing up with a variety of cheeses? Are you avoiding cow's milk products for some reason?

Don't be afraid to season stuff to your taste, too. There's no law that says babies have to eat bland, boring food. My DD2's first word was "pepper," and she meant cayenne. She was a year old, and would eat anything at all if it had cayenne pepper on it.

But all in all, I wouldn't worry at all. Not one bit. Just keep making good food, and enjoying it yourself, and offering in a casual way, and she'll eat just exactly what she needs, when she needs it. And just because she rejects things, don't assume she doesn't like them, and stop offering them. Keep offering-- one day she'll surprise you. But if you stop offering, you may find the list of foods she'll eat gets shorter and shorter.

In my experience, the pickiness gets worse-- the peak seems to be about three years old. Then once they turn three, it seems to get steadily better after that. My DD1 ate NOTHING-- she lived on sliced peeled peaches and yogurt for MONTHS on end. If we weren't having that, that was fine with her-- she just didn't eat. She would hold out, exiting on the tiniest nibbles, until I was offering yogurt and peaches again, and then she'd stuff herself like she was gearing up to hibernate. Then nothing again, even if I waited a whole week to have her favorites again. But she's up there now right this minute eating chicken-and-chard sauteed in garlic sauce right now, and loving it. She's almost six, and spectacularly robustly almost ridiculously healthy, too.