I am a notoriously slow eater. My earliest memory of grade school was in first grade. I was all alone sitting on one of those big long cafeteria tables because everyone else had finished their lunch and had gone outside to the playground to play. I remember the cafeteria lady wiping down the lunch table and telling me (not in a mean way) that if I didn't talk so much during lunch, then I would have already finished eating my lunch. My mother has always been such a slow eater that when she was a little girl, her friends used amuse themselves by counting the number of times she chewed before she swallowed each bite. My maternal grandmother is also an extremely slow eater.
Having said that, my dd (3.5 yo) has us all beat. She is slower than all of us, and I know that she won't ever outgrow it.
It must be excruciating for my husband, who is actually on the fast side, to eat dinner with us. He has gotten into the habit of surfing the internet, folding laundry, paying bills at the dinner table because there is so much time between when he finishes eating and when dd finishes.
My dd's problem is that she takes a bite. Then she forgets to take the next bite. Many minutes can go on, and she doesn't take the next bite. She gets distracted by something, anything, and becomes so engrossed that she forgets to take the next bite. So I have figured out that she needs to be reminded to take the next bite. When I need to hurry things along, I say, "Are you all done?", and I make a motion to take the plate away. This wakes her up enough for her to say, "Not quite yet." and she grabs her plate back. Sometimes that is enough, but sometimes I have to back that up by saying, "You're not eating, and if you're not eating, then you're done." Then, she will take the next bite. This will work for, oh, 60 seconds, until I have to repeat this. I find that I go through this routine about ten times, and then eventually, she decides she really is full. It is not unusual for her to spend 1.5-2 hours eating dinner.
What I truly don't understand is how day care manages to deal with it. The daycare schedules 15 minutes each for morning snack, lunch, and afternoon snack. (I've seen the children, and they really eat much faster than that, so they don't really need more than 15 minutes to eat.) The other children eat the day care center's food, but I send my daughter's food each day, and I know that she usually eats it all, and she must be eating it quickly, because the daycare couldn't possibly have the staff to assign a teacher to sit and watch her eat for an hour and a half. (Trust me, that would be as fun as watching paint dry.) I would love to know what they are doing to get her to eat as fast as the other kids. I suspect they're not doing anything and that it's just peer pressure, combined with the fact that the teacher always has something fun for the children to do after eating.
. Every little thing distracts him and he takes forever, even with his favorite foods (except his very most favorites, which he will shovel down, not good either)
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