A small victory is still a victory

So when you are a mum, the littlest things can be the greatest victories. For me today the greatest victory was getting Miss K to eat her dinner. For any of you who have been in my audience since day one, you will know that Miss K and I have been having fights about food for ages now. For any of you who haven't been here since the beginning, please feel free to visit some old posts, namely this one and this one. At first the fight was getting her to eat food that hadn't been pureed. Then we had to encourage her to feed herself. Now I am trying to get her to eat foods that she doesn't like. Namely vegetables.

Now I will admit that I have gotten lazy. It is much easier on my stress levels and ears to let Miss K get away with not eating her vegetables, and instead give her a Nutella sandwich or a bowl of cereal. But according to the experts, vegetables are good for you, so I decided today to start getting tough and forcing Miss K to start eating them. (Well actually it was decided some time ago that I needed to get tougher on Miss K, but again, lazy.)

So tonight's menu consisted of taco lasagna. (It seriously is nicer than it sounds, and I'll be sharing the recipe with you guys soon, so you can see for yourselves.) I have given this to Miss K a few times, with the same results. The combination of minced meat and vegetables means that she will have a few mouthfuls and then push the bowl away. But tonight that wasn't an option. I started by letting her sprinkle a generous amount of mozzarella cheese on top of her meal, as this sometimes is enough motivation to get her to eat a meal. But this time all she did was try to pick the cheese out and leave the rest of the meal behind. So I tried putting her in the naughty corner. All this did was cause her to chuck a massive tantrum. The last thing I could think of was feeding her myself. We had tears, we had choking, we had smacking (and Miss K wasn't too happy either.)  But I finally managed to get about half a bowl of healthy food into her. At this point we had been "eating" dinner for over half an hour and I was ready to give up. But she had eaten a decent amount of her dinner, and she was happy and full of energy until bed time, so I'm calling this one a win.

But like the baddies always say at the end of the movies "The battle may be over, but the war isn't won." This is a fight I see us having for years and years to come. So tonight's post is really just a reminder for future me, you've done this fight before, you'll do it again, and you can win.

Image courtesy of http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/

SHE ATE THE VEGETABLES!!!!!!