Sunday, May 13, 2007

Eating with kutti

Kutti is a fussy eater. Period.
It's been a struggle to get her to eat ever since she started solids at 6 months. And with her slow weight gain - it has left me a frustrated and always guilty mother. It's been some trick or the other to get some food into her mouth. sometimes it would be putting her in front of the mirror and feeding the 'kannadi paapa' or mirror baby, or making her lie on my lap and give a bowl of water to play while I quickly put in a spoonful when she opens her mouth by mistake, or put on the TV and feed her hoping her favorite ads would run on repeat mode, or....you get the idea. If nothing works, pin her down, hold her hands tight and shove the spoonful inside! Cruel - but what do you do? No matter what the experts say, you can't just leave your kid with a few morsels per day. There are times when she is a model baby and would voluntarily eat her food...and before you can confort yourself that the bad days are over and picture her eating like this for the rest of her life, she will decide that 4 spoonfuls are enough and then you are back to the usual routine.
Sometimes I get bright ideas that maybe I am putting her off food with all my force feeding and maybe I should leave it to her - and that doesn't last more than a day.
Give her a plate of rice to eat and she would drive even a saint up the wall. You see her take one big spoonful and feel happy thinking she is going to eat it. But, no...she has ither ideas. The spoonful gets dumped in another corner of the plate. You stay calm and repeat your requests for the spoon to be put in the mouth. So a spoonful starts moving upwards when suddenly kutti declares that it is 'pey' (perisu or big). So you ask her to take a smaller quantity (chinna spoon or 'chin'). So she agrees 'chin' and takes about 4-5 grains of rice and again changes her mind just as it was about to be put in the mouth. She wants to take a 'tutti'(kutti or tiny) amount. So off go all the grains till there's one tiny morsel left. And by the time she puts the spoon in her mouth, that morsel has fallen off. And poor amma has reached the end of her patience, and picks up kutti and the plate and heads off outside to show her the crows and try and feed her:(