Our Regular Life: Food Fight!

In general, Laura has been a pretty good eater for us (so far). We have had two stints where she started refusing food, both of which were independence-seeking behaviours of wanting to feed herself, I soon realized. We had a good compromise going on for a while involving me feeding her half her meal as a puree and the other half would be finger food of some description that she could feed herself. Well, now that we are veering away from purees we have another battle on our hands: feeding her finger foods to the dogs. I guess she sees us giving the dogs scraps from our plates that we aren't going to eat, so she figures anything she doesn't want to eat she can give to the dogs, too. :S

We have also cut back on the solid food we have been giving her to encourage her to breastfeed more (which has more calories), because of her low weight gain over the past few months. So she really isn't eating that many finger foods to begin with, and a lot of them are going to the dogs, especially the healthier (read: less good tasting) ones. We have started telling her 'no' when she hangs her little food-filled fingers over the edge of her highchair tray, and explain to her (over and over!) that the dogs have their own food, and that this food is for her. I'm starting to wonder if she thinks this is some fun new game to make Mom crazy, especially after last night's shenanigans...

She doesn't like to share noodles or cheerios much, but tonight we were having chicken & lentil soup (she only gets the food bits from the soup, no broth), which she was more than happy to share. After dropping some samples for the dogs I (once again) told her 'no' in a stern voice so she knew I meant business, which, instead of provoking the usual little whimpering pout, elicited a devilish cackle from her! She's 10 months old for crying out loud! You had to hear it! I couldn't believe it and had to laugh at the ridiculousness that was the situation, so I turned my head so she wouldn't see me. I guess this means war!