Today we had Sarah Beth's 18 month checkup. As I've always been concerned with her physical growth, I was excited to see how her weight/height measured up since she's seemed to be chunking up lately. Apparently I was wrong. :) She was 30 3/4 inches tall (yay) and 20.6 lb (boo). I think that was the exact same weight we got at her 12 month checkup, actually. This was a little concerning to the doctor since her height and head size are on track with where they've been for about 9 months (percentiles in the high teens) and her weight fell from the 21st to the 4th percentile. whoops. The frustrating thing is that we've been feeling so good about how she's been eating lately! I told the doctor that since she was so small to begin with, for the first year of her life my main concern every hour of every day was "GET FOOD IN THE BABY." Once we established that she was growing physically at a healthy rate and was at or ahead of where she needed to be developmentally (without even accounting for her prematurity), we started to relax about the food. She eats a wide variety of healthy foods, but we were a little more laid back on the forcing her to eat part. We figured, "She's happy, she's growing, she's healthy. She'll eat when she gets hungry enough, so we're not going to wrestle with her over cleaning her plate." Sometimes she eats EVERYTHING ALL DAY LONG. Sometimes she seems to get by on oxygen alone. Also, she eats HEALTHY FOOD! I guess I shouldn't be surprised that she can't gain weight when her average dinner is grilled chicken and steamed veggies with no butter. :) She doesn't get cookies or ice cream--her most exciting treat is vanilla wafers! Today in an attempt to help her fatten up I gave her her very first taste of a peanut butter (full fat!) and jelly sandwich for lunch. She rejected it and ended up eating handfulls and handfulls of fresh pineapple for lunch. How you chunk up on pineapple alone I'll never know.
Bottom line is that according to Dr. Morton, we should go back to wrestling with her about food and forcing her to eat. Well...we tried that at dinner.
It did not go well.
She went at the green beans like they were going out of style, but as soon as I jammed a few pieces of cheesy potatos in, it all came to a screeching halt. The 3 bites that I forced her to eat plus the one bite of pork tenderloin that I jammed in took about 40 minutes in total because she cried and let the food sit in her open mouth for 10-15 minutes at a time before finally gagging herself and accidentally swallowing it. fun.
Now, I'm not what you'd call tenderhearted--I have no problem listening to her cry for hours if she's just throwing a fit and being disobedient (if she's genuinely hurt and crying, however, I get so worked up that it makes me cry. Ask Mark's parents--the only time they've ever seen me cry was when she and I fell down the stairs and she bit down on her lip so hard that she earned herself her first ER visit.). We view tantrums as acts of defiance and discipline her accordingly, but how do you discipline her for refusing to chew? Seriously? That's not a rhetorical question, folks! I have no problem forcing her to clean her plate if that's what it takes, but I think we'd sit at the high chair all. day. long. if that's what it came to. I'm open to any and all suggestions, friends! :)
