Good eating habits has never come easily in my family.  Our only meal together as a family is breakfast.  After breastfeeding for as long as we could one of our struggles was to get veggies into our son’s growing little body.   Here are a few tricks that worked for our very finicky eater.

After he turned two we started giving him a little bit of Breyer’s vanilla ice cream.  And here’s the secret;  I mixed about half of it with Sweet Potato baby food.  He loved it – - – until he tasted regular vanilla ice cream.

I found another veggie tip in my grocer’s freezer.  My son enjoys a veggie burger from Morning Star.  Especially the Tomatoe and Basil Pizza Burger.  The burgers are packed with protien, quick to serve since they come pre-cooked and Mom and Dad like them too!

Another veggie trick was to allow my son to use a toothpick to stab peas.  (Under extreme supervision – of course.)  This also gave him a chance to practice his fine motor skills.  To speed things along, I’d load up a toothpick with 3-4 peas and let him add the last one then he’d eat them all.  By the time he got the last pea on his toothpick I had loaded up another one for him.  Before we knew it we had gone thru a 1/4 cup of veggies.  For variety we added kernals of sweet corn.

The other veggie trick I discovered was to use a larger medicine syringe to administer a cocktail of low sodium V-8 with fruit juice.  He loved squirting the stuff into his mouth and also helped develope those fine motor skills.

I’m reminded of one of Dr. Doman’s points: to make learning fun and enjoy the experience together.  I hope these fun tips help someone else with their finicky eater.  Heck, I might even start eating peas with a toothpick.