Self Feeding

Getting Caleb to eat has always been a hit or miss kind of thing. Lately, I've stopped caring. I figure he'll eat if he wants to eat, but it's not going to kill him if he refuses. He's old enough to say if he's hungry.

We've been at my mom's house for a while (which is only important to this story because somebody else cooks dinner every night, either my sister or my mom, and if we'd been at home it's less likely this would have happened since I put zero effort into feeding us since it's just me and Caleb). Every night, after Caleb decides he's done eating his food, he'll reach out for my fork. For some reason, every night I give it to him, thinking maybe he'll eat a few more bites if he's using Mommy's fork (which must have happened at some point or else why would I always think that?). But Caleb doesn't want to eat more. Sometimes he just wants to play with my fork and I have to take his fork to finish eating. Maybe he likes the shiny silver color or something. Often though, he wants to feed me dinner. My dinner, off my plate, using my fork, but he's in charge of the whole process.

At lunch today, Caleb picked out some yogurt from the fridge to eat. I put him in his chair and got out his spoon. Once the lid was off the yogurt, he didn't want to eat it. He took the spoon from me and proceeded to feed me the yogurt. He ended up feeding me the entire 4 oz container of yogurt, minus one tiny bite because I insisted he had to at least taste it (and several other bites that fell off the spoon before I could get to them). So even though he didn't eat the yogurt, at least he got some practice using a spoon, right?

Then tonight, we went to a cooking class where we got to taste samples of what they were making. One of them was a mango sorbet. Caleb insisted on holding the little cup and spoon (it was the size of a sample spoon at an ice cream store). He ate two, maybe three, bites himself and then fed the rest of it to me.

I think it's cute. I don't know where this new obsession comes from. And while I'd rather my child was feeding himself since that would mean he was actually eating, I think it's sweet that he wants to feed his mommy.

(Oh, and in other food news, Caleb ate spaghetti tonight. Not very much, but still, he ate it voluntarily which is a big step for him. He typically hates pasta.)