How Baby

We do not talk about the dark pacts I made with the gods whose names have gone unheard for thousands of years, and the sacrifices I made so that Momo would eat everything I put in front of her, from borscht to broccoli to sushi.

One of the biggest angsts, behind sleeping of course, is how to get the right amount and kind of food in your kid – you have to feed them! You have to feed them, or they’ll get taken away! Which has lead to variants on this conversation a lot, because Momo has, for a kid, a remarkable innate desire to eat healthy food. There’s always a kind of witchcraft attributed to managing to keep kids alive: I used the blue plate and he ate carrots, I whistled instead of hummed the lullaby and she slept for five hours, that kind of thing. Superstition breeds in the absence of control of your situation, and nothing is more humbling than the changing whims of a toddler with a death wish. But I didn’t do… anything, really. Or, at least, nothing that I’m sure any other parent would have done!

How easy it would be for me to blithely say ‘oh, I made sure to introduce a variety of food before eighteen months’ (and then sell that ‘secret’ expended over 20k words in my debut parenting advice book), when the ‘trick’ is… that Momo simply loves to eat. It’s in her nature, just like her propensity to (yes, still) walk into traffic. I can’t control those things, and I certainly can’t take credit for them. If we were to have a second child, I’m sure that one would humble me yet again, in this way or another, right quick. So take heart, if you have a picky eater: you’re doing your best to serve a whole, thinking human who comes with their own pre-baked idiosyncrasies, and it doesn’t reflect on anything you did or didn’t do.