My baby has a bougie palate

Speaker A: 00:00:02

Hello, welcome to the show. Today I'm answering a question that when I read it resonated so hardcore with me and that's from Sam.

She said, how did you go with feeding your kids solids? I'm terrified my daughter is only going to want to eat chicken nuggets.

Oh mate, it's so interesting that you call out the chicken nugget specifically because I too have specifically thought I do not want my kid to be that kid who will only eat chicken nuggets.

I went on a trip when I was pregnant with some dear friends of mine and they have a seven year old son or they had a seven year old son at the time and he was the most incredible eater. Now my friends are just wonderful fathers and they like expose him to so many incredible, incredible experiences.

So he's very well traveled and worldly and just, you know, food is a big thing for them too and they've sort of let him eat and kind of put down in front of him everything that they possibly can find. And so his palate, it is sophisticated.

And we would go to dinner on this holiday and it was so fun to go to dinner with him because we would eat all the same things. He was super inquisitive about food. He was really interested in stuff that kids are just not normally interested in, like spicy food.

And just it was so fun being around him. And I just remember thinking, I have to get my kid to eat like this. And it's become a point of obsession since she was born.

Once she was on the solid train, I was like, right, I have one mission and one mission only and that is that I do not want a chicken nugget kid. And listen, if you have a chicken nugget kid, I get it, they're lovely, right? There's nothing wrong with that.

But I just didn't want her to only want chicken nuggets because I have only exposed her to chicken nuggets. And then she's like, well, this is the only food there is.

I wanted her to like chicken nuggets if that was her choice at the end of all of these other choices that she had. So that was my main driver. I know there's nothing that you can do if that's all your kid likes at the end of it.

And I'm not saying if your kid likes chicken nuggets you're a bad parent. But, but I knew I wanted to try and get her to try everything. And if she was like, bleh, whatever, great, that's what food's about, right?

You like some things, you don't like some things. But I didn't want it to be because she'd never experienced flavor outside of a chicken nugget.

So one of the things that I did that I would highly recommend is that I got onto the Solid Starts website and I downloaded their Hundred Days of Foods, First Hundred Days of Foods or something. And it's. It's a paid guide, like, you have to buy it. But I loved it because it took all of the thinking out of the first 100 days.

Now, I will say that some of the things you're feeding the kid are a little weird. There was a day when I was putting red kidney beans and artichokes into my shopping cart.

I was like, I mean, what am I gonna do with these things after she doesn't eat them?

But the process of sort of having a list of foods to go through, where the point is, they've kind of designed it so that you are introducing acid, salt, know, sugar, things like that. Not sugar, sugar, sugar. But, you know, things that they can experience that will expand their sort of palate. And so that is what we did.

We did the different foods for the first 100 days. I don't know if I adhered to it for 100 days, because, to be honest, at a certain point, I'm like, holy heck, you know this.

It does get to a point where it's a bit much. But it's not like you're preparing full meals.

It's literally like you're cutting up a broccoli floret and putting it in front of them, or mashing up a kidney bean and putting it in front of them. And I did baby led weaning. So I. I didn't know what that was.

Before I had a child, I had heard it talked about a lot, and I thought it was a wanky term for letting your child just decide what to do. Now, in a way, it kind of is, right? But it sounded more wanky than it actually was.

All it is is putting different foods down in front of your kid and seeing if they'll eat it, rather than giving them mash all the time and shoving it into their mouth with a spoon.

So the idea is they're supposed to feel like food is about exploration and that they're supposed to choose what they're curious and that they're supposed to practice feeding themselves. So once we got through probably about a month of solids, like, they say that you can start this as soon as they're ready to start solids.

But I Just could not get my head around the fact that yesterday she was eating breast milk and breast milk only, and today I'm supposed to give her a broccoli floret. Not gonna happen. Not gonna happen. So we did the mush for, like a month until she was really in the rhythm of that and enjoyed it.

And she was so, like, I started early. It was probably not early, like four months, which I believe is about the time you're allowed to start.

Might have been four and a half months or something. But I was eating my food around her and you could see she was leaning in, opening her mouth, like, she was like, give me that food right now.

I want it in my mouth. So my best mate was actually here, and I'd been quite scared to do it on my own because you have to get quite comfortable with the gag reflex.

You know, they're not choking, but they are gagging, and they're very good at gagging and they're very good at getting it out. But it does look a lot like choking. So you do have to get a bit comfortable with that, which takes some time, you know.

And the other thing you got to do when they're gagging is that you got to be real positive about it because you got to set the mood, you know, because that's your job as a parent. You set the vibe. You are the vibe police.

So when they are gagging on their food and they look to you, the look they have to get back is, this is so much fun. Great job. Instead of, please don't choke. So you really have to will yourself.

Even though in your brain you're thinking, this looks dangerous out of your mouth. Has to be coming. This is positive.

And that can be hard at times, I gotta be honest, because I did baby lead weaning from quite early, there was a lot of gagging. A lot, a lot. And a couple of those gags where you're like, it's just a fraction of a second too long.

And you're trying to remember the video you watched on Tiny Hearts Education about the back blows. And you'd be like, please don't let me be that person. Please, please, please, please, please. But can I remember it?

Am I going to remember this in the moment? I've got to rewatch that video. It's very traumatic and stressful the whole teaching date.

So anyway, I'm so glad she can eat now, and I don't have to go through that. The thing that you don't realize when you are not a parent is that you have to teach them every single single thing. They don't know anything.

So it's just a lot the stuff that you have to get through to get to the other side. So we did baby lead weaning, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. I think that is the reason that she is a great eater now.

And I still, however long later, just put bits and pieces in front of her. I don't cook something for her because then I'm like, you got one shot at liking this, and if you don't like it, we're stuffed.

But if I put nine different things down in front of you and you feel like you're choosing what you eat, then you are much more likely to eat more. And if you don't like that, then you'll just eat that bit. And if you don't like that, you'll just eat that bit.

But if I put the spaghetti Bolognese down in front of me and you're like, I'm not into spaghetti bolognese. Well, what else have we got on offer at the buffet? Not much. So I don't cook for her.

I don't eat with her either, because, I mean, don't leave her in a room to do it by herself. I sit there with her, but I've tried to eat with her because I thought that would be a lovely, romantic thing to do as a family.

She eats all of my food, so I don't eat with her anymore because I cannot get a mouthful in. So I just put everything down in front of her. And I've done that since the very beginning. And this has been awesome.

It's been great because she's felt a lot of control from the very beginning. And she's really inquisitive. And I think it's created that environment of here is a bunch of things. You are independently trying those things.

So once they get to a point where they're at the toddler phase and they want to do everything themselves, well, you are doing everything yourself, sweetheart. You are feeding yourself. You're choosing. So they actually like that process.

And now when I pull something out that's different to her, or I go to a cafe and I sit there and there's something she hasn't seen before. She says, try it. I'm like, yeah, we can try it. And that is how I've ended up with a child with a bougie palette.

So the other day, I was telling a friend of mine at work about some of the things that I cook for her, and she informed me that it Wasn't normal.

I thought I was just giving her normal stuff because I'm giving her the things that she likes that I have found out that she's liked through this process of mostly if we're somewhere and she'll go, can I try it? And then she likes something.

But I was talking about the prawns and the smoked salmon that I had in the shopping cart and she was like, I've never had either of those items in the cupboard for my children. And then I realized, oh, I don't actually eat those things at home. I just buy them for her. She's sending me broke. P.S.

like, I do not have a budget that can be pulling prawns and smoked salmon into the cart every week. You know, we are solo mumming this thing and I'm hemorrhaging money in daycare and childcare.

So, you know, we're not, we're not living in a champagne budget here. But she loves these things so much, I cannot buy them for her.

And when she comes home from school, I just want to give her something that she really likes. So prawns is a go to.

The only way I worked out that those are her absolute favorite thing in the whole wide world is that I had to feed them to her to do the allergy test. So she had to have prawns and she woofed those things down like, fingers crossed you don't have an allergy because we've eaten nine of them.

So let's get the EpiPed on standby because this could be a disaster. So that was how I found out that the smoked salmon. I went to my best mate's cafe and I thought, I never order smoked salmon.

Why don't I order smoked salmon? Mistake. Because I didn't get to eat any of it because she was like, try it. And she was so into it.

I had to order another side of smoked salmon and I just ate the potato. So that was a great breakfast. And another reason why eating around her is a bad idea. So that's another one that is on semi high rotation.

I've had to cut back on that because I'm like, actually, this is a piss take. Like, we're not having to smoke salmon for dinner, you know, as we can have the salmon in the tin that's much, much less expensive. But she loves it.

And the other day I actually did realize and I sent my who I had traveled with a message about this because I realized, holy crap, I have done it when I should. We sat down for dinner the other day. And I said, what do you want for dinner? In her broken language kind of way.

You know, I don't ask her all the time. P.S. like, I'm not sitting in there slaving over a hot stove for nine hours going, what can I cook you?

However, if she says, I don't want that or I do want that, I listen to that. I ask her, do you want some milk with dinner? Yeah. Okay. Do you want some milk with dinner? No. Okay. We don't have to have milk. No problems.

Do you want some cheese? Yeah. Okay, great. We'll have cheese. Because that, for me, is what a good relationship with food is all about. It's about your own personal choice.

And we're all different. We all like different things.

So if I put cheese down in front of her and she doesn't want to eat the cheese, I'm not going to force her to eat the cheese because she doesn't want to eat the cheese, and that's totally fine. And anything that we do in parenting in, like, childhood is all about trying to teach them things for adulthood.

Now, in whose adult world are we being forced to eat cheese? If we don't like cheese, we don't have to eat cheese.

I understand the idea of being difficult, and I think when she gets older, if she's pushing back on me, cooking things or giving things to her, like, that's a different thing to, I don't like this. I don't want to eat it. That is a reasonable request, I feel.

And I would rather put the things down in front of her that she likes that she's going to eat, and for her to really enjoy eating, which she does now because it has become actually one of our favorite things to do.

I love going to a cafe with her because she loves to eat, and she'll happily sit there for 45 minutes with her little platter of stuff and move through it and try something off my plate.

And one of the most spectacular moments in my entire parenting journey is the day that she ate something and I ate something, and we both did the happy food dance together, which is a little wiggle left to right that I have been doing for as long as I can remember, because food, for me is just my happy place. I cook the most boring food you've ever eaten at home.

Like, I would not serve it up to anybody that I cared about, because at home, I'm like, this is about getting it done. It's about protein and veg.

It's about fueling the body and then move on to the Next thing, when I go out to a restaurant, give me the oxtail, give me the escargot, give me whatever you got on the menu that I would never cook at home because I want it all. And when I taste something good, I'm going to give you the happy food dance. Because nothing better than eating good food.

And we were at a cafe and she did the happy food dance and I was doing the happy food dance. And I'm like, this is what life is about and this is what I did this for, you know? So that was a very proud moment.

But I did ring my friends the other day when she did ask me for sardines, olives and capers for dinner. And I thought, listen, I have achieved what I set out to achieve.

But I might have pushed it too far because I don't know that this is a menu that we can do publicly. But she's in to good food and she loves it and she enjoys it. And I'm very conscious that I want meal time to be a happy time.

I want it to be a we've got all the time in the world time. That's why I don't eat with her. I'd be finished in five seconds and off I'd trot. I do stuff. I bring her into the kitchen, I do stuff in the kitchen.

I'll often prep stuff for tomorrow or whatever. And I talk to her and we put the music on and she just sits there and eats. And I will always have a shower when she's eating. I'm safe, don't worry.

If anything happened, I can jump out in one second. But I just put her outside the glass doors because otherwise I'm having a shower after she goes to bed.

And that eats into the one hour of alone time that I have before I have to get to bed because I got to get up and get her early in the morning. So that's my shower time.

Because I know that she's entertained, she's having a good time, and she gets a little dinner and a show, you know, so that is what I did. I would highly recommend the solid starts thing. I would highly recommend baby led weaning.

I just feel like making meal times fun and something that they're interested in because they're choosing things and they're inquisitive. Like, I have felt that that has helped me to help her be a really good eater and to enjoy food and to enjoy the process of food.

And now I just love that.

That's one of my favorite things to do with her is to, you know, watch her eat and sit there starving because I can't eat anything because she'll eat it off my plate. And then I'll be buying smoked salmon and we'll go broke and I'll be moving out of my home. So that's the story of my baby's bougie palette.

Bless her to bits. If you have a question, please just head to the description in the episode, click the link and you can send it there.

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