Got one right for sure

Today we went to the diner for breakfast after having missed on this outing for the past several weeks. If the weather is decent (meaning nothing falling from the sky), we walk. I usually get an omelette along with potatoes and toast, which The Boy shares. Musical Daddy often gets a "burrito breakfast" that comes with potatoes as well; he shares the potatoes but not the burrito.

GOOD eatin' this morning. It helped that we put ketchup on breakfast. Everything that we gave The Boy to eat was gone by the time he decided that he was done. I'm so glad...and yet, there's chemo coming up soon so all of this good eating will probably go out the window. At least he has otherwise good eating habits to which he can come back.

Now that The Boy is nearly 14 months old, it's interesting to compare him to other children of a similar age in terms of eating. Three other children that we noticed at the diner come to mind. The first is a boy, almost 2, whom we see every now and then, although today we just noticed him on the way in. When he was smaller, he'd mostly eat tiny pieces of things with his fingers. Now he's a silverware-using guy. We're pretty impressed by his prowess with the fork and spoon.

The other two children, however, were another story. The first child that we saw was pitching fits about being in the high chair. When he finally made it in, he just got a scrap here and there. He also had something in a bottle at the table. The second child looked older than The Boy by only a bit and was sitting in the high chair being spoon-fed oatmeal and bananas. He was drinking from a cup with a straw, though. The family was impressed by the way that The Boy fed himself. I recommended broccoli.

I can't tell you how glad I am that The Boy was feeding himself right from the beginning. The fact that we weren't obsessive about rushing him into eating food, the fact that we never cared about whether he was eating "stage 1" or "stage 2" jarred nonsense, and the fact that we already knew that everything he touched was going into his mouth at some point anyway made the decision pretty easy for us. Musical Daddy was a bit skeptical at first--after a few weeks of The Boy playing with food and eating just a bit at the table, he asked when we were going to grind up a banana and feed it to him--but he bought in pretty quickly as well.

The Boy was eating at restaurants regularly by about 7 months. Before that it was somewhat prohibitive because he was only eating a few things. But as a result of his always sitting at the table with us, for as long as he was able to sit, he always knows how to behave at mealtime.

Score one for us.