Food and the Grumpy Face

Happy Thanksgiving, Everybody!

This, my friends, is The Grumpy Face...well...kinda. I am on the hunt, a photo hunt, for the true grumpy face.

This is about 2 weeks old now. He is beginning to use it appropriately. I think, at first, he was using it because he just discovered that he could manipulate his facial expressions and therefore practiced doing it often (just like when he learned how to walk). That is hummus on his face. The whole food thing continues to perplex me (as does the whole sleep thing.) On this night he would not eat the soup that he so hungrily gulped down the night before - he kept pointing at the dried fruit. I thought, he needs to eat something, so I gave him some dried apricots...but then decided he needed something more substantial and toasted a piece of bread. Then I thought he needed protein so I spread some hummus (that's full of protein, right?) on the toasted bread. Of course he saw this and then wanted to do it himself. So, I handed him the butter knife, but then he wanted to scoop out of the hummus container and I was like, no way, José,  and so I tried to put some hummus on his plate so he could take from there and HE was like, no way, José. Guess who won this battle? YEP.

How can you resist that face? So, he ate the entire tub of hummus by scooping it out with the butter knife and putting it straight into his mouth. It was very Rambo-y or Crocodile Dundee-y. At least he ate something other than dried fruit for dinner, right?

I just wanted to post a great link that I read (and two more articles that that article linked to) in regards to yesterday's post Losing My Parental Cool. It's from Janet Lansbury's blog (one of my favorite parenting blogs. She wrote the article that I read about what to do when your child bites you.) I love her philosophy (a majority of the time). She is a great guide to have when I really feel lost in this parenting challenge. She writes:

"Our children are born sentient — as present as you and I — and so our primary job is forging person-to-person relationships with them, relationships that are honest, caring, respectful and unconditionally loving.

Yet all children exhibit behaviors that are impulsive and irrational, especially during periods in their development when they need to resist us in order to test their wings (like the toddler and teen years). How are we supposed to respect our small “person” when she can be so disrespectful, hurtful and downright rude?"

Read more here on how to manage this type of behaviour.