The way to a boy's heart

I've been told that people have a hard time feeding their toddlers. They have to bribe them to eat or make airplane noises or distract them to get just a few bites into their mouth. This is about as far from our experience as you can get.

Kai loves food. Baby food or cereal, healthy or sweet or anything off our plates, he'll eat it. And lots of it. Our main problem is that he doesn't stop. We can feed him his own meal at 5:30, plus fruit for dessert and he'll still eat half the food off our plates at 6 and then down his bottle at 7. This is not a complaint. I love that he has a great appetite and doesn't spend dinner throwing (too many) things on the floor or avoiding the spoon.

We've been moving him away from the baby purees and onto "adult food". As you'd expect, this has been a pretty easy transition. It does, of course, mean that we have to make sure we're eating more balanced meals so that Kai still gets his veggies, which is a good thing for everyone.

In the last week, we've had our first road block with Kai's unending appetite. Rather than pureeing a bunch of veggies, we just cooked them and gave them to him to eat as finger food. He was not very excited by this. He ate the carrots and a bit of the cauliflower, but would not go near the broccoli. He also will not eat raw zucchini. So, we puréed it like normal and tried to feed it to him that way. Nope. It's like we showed him what real food could be like and he won't go back.

I'm pretty picky myself (understatement), so I tried to think of something that would make me eat all those veggies. The answer, pack it into a quesadilla. So I put the purée into a tortilla with a bit of cheese and pan-fried it. Bingo! He couldn't get enough of this new "big kid" meal. Which meant he shoved pieces into his mouth as fast as I could give them to him. We've learned to only give him small amounts of anything or it all finds its way into his mouth at the same time.

I feel like I'm getting a bit of a hold on this mom thing. It feels good.