Your toddler loved to eat oatmeal and ate it for three meals out of four in the day. Now you can’t pay her to eat it. She went through an apple juice trend, refusing all other drinks if it wasn’t apple juice. Now she just turns her nose up at the offering.
In our house, it was treasure. That’s what the midget called chocolate chip mini muffins. She developed an obsession with them. We couldn’t swap them out for any other food when she wanted treasure for a snack. Then one day, she just stopped eating it altogether – leaving six boxes of the blooming things on our shelves for my husband to eat.
They’re Not Fickle
Your toddler is not necessarily being fickle so much as they are exerting some measure of control over their environment and their diet. Your midget probably enjoyed the foods they were having, because often times they are still fascinated by the tastes and the textures. They may also be craving a vitamin or mineral to be found in the food.
From ages 2 to 3, my daughter wouldn’t touch plain milk. She wanted chocolate milk or no milk at all. From 3 to 5, chocolate milk went by the wayside and it was plain whole milk she wanted.
Murphy’s Dietary Train made several stops at our house along the way, we went through phases with bananas, apples, potatoes, vegetables and meats. In fact, one of my favorites was the spinach train. She wanted spinach with her breakfast, lunch, snack and dinner.
We went through two cases of spinach during this phase and then she gave up spinach for peas. Eventually, the peas lost their seat on the train to green beans. A few years later and she likes all three equally. So be patient with your toddler and their tyrannical dietary needs.
Chances are that if you reintroduce the food they’ve suddenly gone quite off of in a few weeks after, they will enjoy it again – but chances are the passion for eating it non-stop will have been extinguished and they’ll eat it a little more normally.
What foods have you encountered on the Murphy Dietary Train?
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