Bigger girl food

Emma still keeps us on our toes when it comes to eating.  She can go for a couple of days when she doesn't want to eat and will only drink smoothies followed by a few days of wanting to eat everything in the house.  I've learned not to get too worried if we are on day 3 of her not wanting to eat anything and that's when I stock up on some of her favorite foods in anticipation of the feasts she will want again soon.

But frequency of eating isn't the only thing Emma's changing these days.  She wants to eat more and more table food even though she isn't really ready for more solids without choking.  She wants to sit in her Childrite chair instead of her Special Tomato seat.  She wants to feed herself even though she needs lots of hand-over-hand help.  And if any dessert or sweet item is brought out before she is done her meal she promptly refuses to take another bite of her meal and demands to move on to dessert.

And so we are once again following her lead.

We stopped pureeing her food and are either chopping it up finely with the Pampered Chef chopper (that's been hanging our in our kitchen for ages looking for a reason to be used) or using the container that came with the immersion blender we purchased for her birthday.  The container is nice because it is an in-between texture of chopped and pureed and results in a bit of a chunky consistency.  The blender is the Cuisinart cordless rechargeable immersion blender with a couple of attachments.  We thought it would make travel easier if we didn't always have to preplan meals and bring them along - especially for when we are going someplace for a few nights - and would make eating out easier as we could just blend the restaurant food up in the cordless contraption.  We've found that it is very handy at the house, too, and it is often used several times a day.  (Note:  In case you are looking at purchasing one of these blenders, we purchased this item at Bed Bath and Beyond.  Emma and I went to the store to see it in person but it's an online only item.  However, if you order it at the store you can use the 20% off coupon that always comes in the mail.  Emma gave the cashier big smiles and turned on the charm so they also shipped it to our house for free making it a pretty good deal.)

For dinner tonight we had tacos.  Everyone in our house agrees that tacos are great so it was an easy Friday night meal eaten without complaint.  Since tacos would be hard to "chop" and then feed to Emma I just used the container attachment for the Cuisinart and it did a great job of turning the food into a form that Emma could enjoy.  Emma loves tacos and today was one of her eating days (horray!) so we even had to mix up another batch because she wanted seconds.  That made this Mommy quite happy!

For the last few weeks Emma has been putting up a fight when it's time to go into he Special Tomato chair to eat.  I'm not really sure why since she actually likes this chair.  Maybe it's a phase?  Anyway, we've been using her Childrite chair at the table on days when she won't use the Special Tomato.  It's not our preferred chair for meals since she sometimes tosses her head back and bonks it on the hard wood chair.  Also, it's not really secure and we don't want her to tip over and fall out of it so we make sure someone is right next to Emma at all times.  She seems to love this set-up even if we are less than thrilled about it.  I'm sure that, as with all things Emma, she will shake up where she wants to sit yet again and go back to her Special Tomato for eating.

So today I'm thankful that Emma continues to make progress with her eating.  That she is undaunted by the challenges she faces with her oral motor skills and her fine motor skills and is determined to one day eat table food independently.  That makes me very thankful, indeed!