the twinkle in my eye

in a positive turn-up for the books, the twinkle is now fine with special k doing most things, instead of screaming her preference for me. (geez i hated that stage.) this has come at just the right time because i have this horrid cold that won’t go away and i really don’t have the health or the mood to do really good toddler parenting. so this morning special k got up to her in the morning and she happily got up with her. this hasn’t happened for months and months – i have had to get up to her every single morning. (poor me.) and now they’ve gone off to the pet shop together (because there is a petting farm on display there today) and the twinkle actually happily told me (in her grunting and pointing way) that she was going in the car with om and i was staying here to sleep, kiss, wave, bye-bye!

so i am here wallowing in my snot and misery and willing myself to get off the computer and into the shower. and then into clothes – a novel concept. haven’t worn them for a couple of days.

the food questions are vexed.

the twinkle does seem to eat plenty at the baby factory. they always report that she has eaten multiple serves of lunch, regardless of what is served. i once made a joke about her not eating vegetables and the staff looked at me puzzled because apparently she has no problem eating vegies there. and once k walked in the baby factory and found the twinkle eating a carrot stick! but she never, ever eats a vegetable at home or at my parents’ place where she spends a lot of time. we’re trying lots of things, but none of them successfully get vegetables into her.

we serve up vegetables repeatedly lots of times in the hope that after 12 times she’ll finally take a bite. she never does. the beautiful vegetables always go to the worms.

we try to hide vegetables in other foods. pikelets, mini-quiches, dips. she always seems to know and makes a face and spits them out. or pulls the remnants of vegies out befor nibbling.

we’ve bought commercial kids foods that look like chicken nuggets or wedges or other tasty treats but which have vegies in them. she pulls them apart and picks out the vegie bits.

we’ve  sung “there’s a party in my tummy” and read the book over and over. this is brobee’s big song on yo gabba gabba so you’d think she’d be into it. she knows that carrots want to go to the party in her tummy. her sign for carrot (she doesn’t have a word for it yet) is to point to her throat (her throat is her tummy, her belly button is her belly in her 2 year old logic). but there’s no way she’ll actually let them in.

we’ve served her what we’re eating and sat up as a family and tried to all eat the same. she has no interest in eating what we’re eating unless it’s eggs.

i sometimes wonder if we should be feeding her formula or vitamin-enriched milk, in case she’s not getting enough nutrients from her diet. but i’m reluctant to do that for all sorts of reasons.

on the plus side, she eats plenty of breakfast foods – weetbix, porridge, bread, raisin toast, cheese, eggs, fruit, milk. and she eats muesli bars and kids fruit snacks and the like. it’s just meat and veg (and we’re far more concerned about the veg) that she won’t eat.

this afternoon i’m going to try making vegie muffins with her. i’m sure she’ll enjoy the activity but not eat the muffins, but it’s worth a shot. the other new strategy we’re going to try is no snacks or milk after 3pm in the hope that she’ll be hungry enough at dinner time (5pm ish) to eat veg and meat. (she can have fruit or water, of course, just not muesli bars and other snacks).

when it comes to cooking, she loves it. k especially has been baking with her for ages. there is one strategy i have used with her when baking that could be worth sharing. it helps avoid having her germy little fingers in the bowl, and also helps avoid stuffing up the recipe by having more or less of an ingredient go in due to her measuring technique and chaotic helping style (picture an upturned bag of flour in a bowl of chocolate cake batter). we have a set of three nesting plastic  mixing bowls from ikea. i give her the little one and a short wooden spoon and i use the big ones. for every carefully measured ingredient i put in my big bowl, i let her put some in her own bowl. a random amount, i don’t care, as long as the total volume of ingredients doesn’t exceed the volume of the bowl. i let her mix it up – as unthoroughly as she chooses – and i let her bake it in a little muffin pan or two. at the end i still have my perfect cake (mmmm… guinness chocolate cake) and she has a brown blob which she cooked and can eat if she chooses. (with cake, she rarely eats more than a mouthful or two – she likes it but she doesn’t scoff it). oh, and when it’s guinness chocolate cake, i don’t give her any guinness to put in hers. that would be wasteful! oh, and dangerous/inappropriate.

here is what the last two hours of my tuesday at home with the twinkle looked like this week.

we had bought a cheapo box of shrek cupcake mix at dimmey’s earlier in the day so we decided to do some baking in the afternoon. i put the green cake mix in the white bowl and turned away to get the milk and eggs. when i turned back, this is what i found:

we mixed up the mix and it was finger-licking good.

instead of swirling the raspberry coulis into the cakes, the twinkle just ate it by the spoonful. (the coulis didn’t come with the shrek cake mix – just had it in the fridge.)

and she gave an evil laugh. or was it her happy face? i can never tell the difference.

this is a happy face for sure. a happy, green face.

i got her to help me clean up her mess while the cakes baked.

then she decided she needed to pull a chair over to the sink and line up some plastic cups on the edge of the bench and fill them up with water. puddles ensue.

sensing she was thirsty (a mother’s intuition?) i made her a raspberry milkshake. she insisted on pouring it from shaker to cup and back again. pink puddles ensue.

she goes and gets a clean tea towel and does the floor-clean-up-with-tea-towel-under-foot. look how sodden her pants are.

in a clean, dry outfit we iced the cakes.

then she smashed one into crumbs and fed it to brobee.

i sat down with a cup of coffee to recover and she insisted that she needed a cup of tea. “cheeeee!” i made her her favourite extremely weak, extremely milky, barely warm, quite sweet cup of tea. she spills it everywhere. then she eats apple and blackcurrant snacks from a bowl. without her hands.

i went to a very big effort to cook “pancakes” for the twinkle’s dinner. i got the leftover cous cous from monday night’s dinner and fished out all the olives. i pureed the rest of it into oblivion (tomatoes, peas, garlic, onion, lemon, carrots) and added egg and flour and made pikelets that worked beautifully, tasted delicious, and look appropriately bland (the twinkle’s preference). i buttered them up nicely and put a little piece of cheese on each one.  and i served them up to her over on the corner of the table that wasn’t covered in muck.

she ate the cheese and the butter then offloaded the “pancakes” to brobee’s plate.

then she hid the last one in this tin.

then she pushed brobee’s plate back over to me.

and that’s pretty much a typical afternoon/early evening at home with the twinkle.

i’ve been meaning to blog for ages, but now i’m here i can’t remember what i was going to say.

there was the thing about the twinkle being two and it really being a tumultuous age. i remember when she was 14 months and i read somewhere (robyn barker, perhaps?) that the terrible twos really start about 14 months and i thought, yes, that’s right, she’s hit the terrible twos now. isn’t it terrible? but now she’s two, she’s doing the terrible twos for realz. and it’s not that she’s a terrible kid – she’s really quite lovely and clever and funny – it’s just that her frustration boils over very quickly. she’s very bossy but can’t vocalise everything she wants to say, so that frustrates her. and she’s very determined and independent, and when she can’t do something because she’s too little or too unco, it drives her crazy. and now i am starting to understand this whole two-year-old tantrum thing that everyone knows about. it’s part of a learning curve about dealing with emotions. i get that now, and i didn’t get it before i had a two year old. but it can be a killer to be in the middle of it.  how much longer, do you think?

there’s the thing about the comfort items. she’s big on the comfort items. she has her skanky blanky which goes to bed with her, and which tries to hang around the house with her. there’s the dummy. even skankier than the blanky and theoretically just for bed time. there’s her bottle of milk. and now there’s her brobee toy. the bottle of milk we’ve just about killed off. i mean, we still give her milk in a bottle when she wants it, but we don’t let her take it to bed now – this was a bad habit we inadvertently created with her a couple of months ago. it took a painful couple of nights to stop that one. i’m sick of the dummy, especially the drool that comes with it. she only has it at home and in the car – it’s not allowed to go anywhere else (neither is blanky) but i wish she didn’t ‘need’ it anymore. in my mind, i’ve decided not to replace it when it gets lost or dead. i’m not sure if k shares this dream. but i don’t yet feel strong enough to tackle a cold turkey approach with the dummy. and blanky is a pain because it’s big and gets dirty and she likes it to hang on the back of her kitchen chair when she’s eating in the kitchen and i’ve caught her snacking on dried weet-bix caked onto blanky. it’s really hard to get a chance to wash it and dry it because it’s hard to distract her enough from it long enough to get it into the machine and onto the line. and now her brobee toy has become her latest comfort item. he has to go everywhere with her, except bed. at bed time he has to sit on the couch, and he has to be there in the morning when she wakes up. any of these items on their own are harmless enough, i suppose, but it gets particularly painful when she wants to have a cuddle on me (always on me, never next to me) and i have to gather up blanky, dummy, bottle and brobee and position them all to her liking.

we’ve discussed ‘time out’ as a technique for dealing with undesirable behaviour. really only the stuff that is dangerous, like kicking or hitting – both of which she has tried recently. it’s a bit of a test – she makes direct eye contact and hits us when she’s angry about something. not all the time, but sometimes. we did one time out in her bedroom after a hit recently. after that we decided not to make it in her bedroom because we don’t want that room to be a bad place to be. so next time we’ll do it on the arm chair in the corner of the lounge where she won’t be able to get much eye contact or distraction. but we’ll probably have to hold her in place and try not to laugh.

this stuff is so boring, but i’ve been wanting to write it down so i can remember what it was like and when. feel free not to read. oh sorry, i should have said that at the start before you wasted your time getting down to this point.