Whenever I forget how difficult it is to have a child who doesn’t eat, God does this really great thing where he makes one of my kids have my issues.  And then I get frustrated and angry and tell my kids to pull it together – and then I realize I am doing the things I tell all of the parents I work with not to do.  Thanks, God.  I appreciate it…but not enough to hope it keeps happening.

Gus has recently stopped eating a lot of foods.  He has stopped eating all meats, aside from ground or processed meats.  He has stopped eating all vegetables aside from baked carrots or sweet potatoes.  And he has stopped eating all fruits except bananas.

But here is the thing.  He will chew all of the foods.  But he won’t swallow them.  It is the worst.  He chews shredded pork until it is all mashed up, and then he spits it into a napkin and happily takes another bite.  He does the same thing with all the other foods.  And you will see me saying “Gus, you swallow that now!” from accross the table.  He responds with “My not gonna.” (yeah we have pronoun work to do too).

So I needed to assess.  Which is so easy to do with all of your well behaved children, but assessing mine – different ball game.  And the assessment would reveal that he wasn’t a butt, he wasn’t unable to chew and move food, he just couldn’t get the food past his offensively gigantic tonsils.  Those suckers were touching eachother. Gross.  I wouldn’t eat either.

This makes sense.  He was eating carbs and all the foods that can essentially be pureed in his mouth before swallowing.  Kinda gross, but effective.

I know better.  I mean, this is what I do for a living.  But my education and knowledge always ends up useless when it comes to my own kids.  However, when it comes to your kids – know this.  If your child is a great eater, and suddenly stops these habits, don’t freak out.  On rare occasion, your child may have developed a feeding disorder or food aversion (which often happens after a traumatic event with food or a severe illness).  Before you set your child up with an appointment for a feeding consult – or call them a turd and yell at them for being horrible duirng meal time – check out those tonsils.  Kids are smart, they know what hurts them and they know how to avoid what hurts them.

I will keep you posted on the tonsils. Hopefully some flonase will shrink them down.  But surgery may be on the horizon!