Toddler Food Ideas {Keepin' it real} | Laughs

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a toddler not asleep, must be in want of food.

If you are/have been the proud owner of one or more toddlers then you will certainly understand the truth of the above sentence. Toddlers have an insatiable appetite. Whether it's from the constant movement and noise making or the effort it takes to drive their parents to absolute distraction, toddlers need food. 



And lots of it.

I'm pretty sure scientists are getting close to definitive proof that toddlers burn more energy than the sun in a a 24-hour period.

No sooner have the small ones awoken then they are demanding food. A drink bottle of cows milk for the big one, a lazy feed of Mummy milk for the smaller one. As soon as the milk has been consumed it's on to the biscuits. The biscuits are merely a stop-gap measure to allow Mum to get out of bed and get her head together, ready for the day. Sometimes I'm allowed to pee by myself and even get the jug boiling before they are beating down the bathroom door, demanding breakfast.

Depending on how close I've gotten to making myself a coffee, breakfast can be anything from toast to porridge to yoghurt and muesli. I'm not very creative or functional before about 11am and the consumption one mother-flippin' HUGE-ass coffee, so the kids have learnt to take what they can get for this meal without arguing.

They know Mummy needs her coffee like a hater needs his hate, and the big one has even started bringing me make-believe cups of tea & coffee at random intervals throughout the day. Usually just after I've lost my shit for some random reason. I take it as a sure sign that it's definitely time to boil the jug for the twentieth time and actually make and drink another cup of joe!

Lunch and dinner are interesting affairs when you have toddlers. I hardly ever bother slaving over elaborate meals for them because a) I've never slaved over elaborate meals for anyone and I sure as shit ain't gonna start now. And b) because whatever I feed them is going to mostly end up in their hair, on their clothes or on the ground anyway, so why bother with elaborate anything!

The big toddler, now that she has become proficient at using cutlery and sitting still for longer than 30 seconds at a time, usually does a pretty good job of getting most of the food in her mouth. Unless that food is yoghurt. Then it's on like Donkey Kong and she deliberately turns the spoon over just before it reaches her mouth and it ends up all over the bench.

I've recently come to realisation that this spoon technique is really just a ploy to get as much of the damn stuff on the bench as she can, to then facilitate finger painting in it. So now, as of last week, yoghurt is banned until she can learn to eat it properly. If she wants yoghurt from now on she has to go crying to Nanny who buys those fancy squeezy pouches of the stuff because she is not getting it from me! I got enough crap to clean up without a tiny terrorist deliberately adding more!

The small child hasn't quite progressed to using cutlery as yet, and is still firmly in the finger food/being spoon-fed stage. Most of the time I try to give her stuff that she can feed to herself, because feeding a toddler who only wants to open her mouth a few millimetres at a time is extremely boring and ain't nobody got time fo' dat!

When she is spoon fed I've started to give her a spoon of her own so she can practise and I reckon 3 times out of 10 she actually manages to get food from the bowl into her mouth via the spoon. The rest of the time it falls down that gap between child and high chair tray, where it then becomes squished so well into her clothes that it almost becomes part of the pattern.

The smallest toddlers favourite game at the moment though when imbibing finger food, is to sweep her hand from side to side across the high chair tray and launch as much food as she can off the tray or plate and on to the floor around her chair. I must say she has really perfected this technique over the last few weeks and were starting to see her get some real distance with her morsels.

At this stage I'm fairly certain that about 75% of the food she is served is ending up on the floor, if my calculations while sweeping and/or vacuuming are accurate. At any rate, I'm starting to think that I have been going about feeding the small child the wrong way.

For no sooner have I gotten her out of the high chair and gone to pull the older toddler down from the roof (exaggeration of course, but not by much!) then the younger toddler is happily sitting on the floor beside the high chair eating the aforementioned launched food.

Oh Joey. This is how I imagine Zee in the future!

Now if I were a better mother I'd scoop her up and deposit her a safe distance away while I clean the area and remove all food scraps to the nearest trash receptacle, but I'm not a better mother. (You know what's coming next, don't you?!).

I figure it's far easier to let her hoover up the food she has dropped in her own special way, and then come along afterwards and get anything she's missed with the actual hoover. Why should I break my back picking up all the food she's thrown on the ground when she is quite clearly not done with that, and I can just let her finish her meal there?

Hygiene, some of you might answer. But I say "immunity building" to that! Due to her improvement in food launching skills, there are times when food is spread so far and wide that I miss a piece here and there and it's not until a day or two later when I do a full back-room sweep that I come across it. If she hasn't beaten me to it that is!

The way I see it, if she can chow down on some random piece of day old toast that I've missed and still be fine, then she can sure as heck eat the food she's dropped from the meal she's just "finished". She's happy, I'm happy, and it cuts down on the time I have to spend cleaning up the food.

It's a parenting win in my books!

I'm starting to think that maybe I should just drop all of her food straight on the floor as soon as it's ready and be done with it. Why bother with this eating in the high chair charade when we both know that eating the food off the floor is what it's really all about for her. And when she's done she can simply move on to the bits and pieces that the big toddler has dropped from her lunch and I can sit and drink a coffee in peace without a tiny terrorist begging me for more food!

Seriously, who needs a dog when you have toddlers?!

How do you/did you find the experience of feeding toddlers? Is it a universal toddler thing, this joy of throwing food during a meal and then eating it off the floor afterwards, or have I really given birth to something genetically closer to a dog than a human child?

Linking up with those glorious Lizards of the Lounge today.

Find me here:

Facebook / Twitter / Bloglovin 
Subscribe by Email

My First Family Photography Shoots // Photography
Parenting. It doesn't get easier, it just gets different // Motherhood // Life
Opinions are like assholes. Linky Lovin' Friday {17th October 2014} // Blogging
1, 2, 3, 4. Hi-5! Lunch at Darling Harbour // Life // PR
Three Bloggers and a Camera // Life // Photography
Linky Lovin' Friday {10th October 2014} // Blogging
What are we going to watch on TV? // Entertainment // Sponsored