Little J is going through a phase: he’s stopped eating.

Well, not really, but it sometimes seems like it. He certainly doesn’t eat very much and he’s grown suddenly picky. For the amount of activity he does in a day he doesn’t seem to get adequate calories, and the kinds of food he craves aren’t exactly healthy. When we serve lunch, for example, and we have a sandwich, grapes, and a handful of chips, we have to give him the chips last (while the rest of us get them with our meal) or he will only eat the chips and be finished with the meal. Withholding the chips is the only way we can get him to eat the healthy food.

He used to be an amazing eater. He ate everything, and vast quantities of it! I guess he was growing and catching up, though, and now he’s all caught up and ready to act like your typical American picky preschooler. Eating nothing. Subsisting on air and a slice of cheese.

Luckily, I have prior experience with your typically eating disordered 4 year old.

Starting when Big J was three I swear he lived for two years on a cup of milk and a handful of goldfish crackers a day. He ate practically nothing, plus he was super picky about what he would eat. Nothing slimy, crunchy, too hot, sour, salty, or hard to chew. Nothing weird. Nothing vegetable-like, except broccoli (thank goodness for that). Nothing that was a funny color or shape. Nothing he hadn’t already tried before (which was difficult, of course, since he’d tried only a few of the food possibilities available in this world).

Things he would eat included the aforementioned goldfish crackers, vegetarian chicken nuggets, veggie burgers (we weren’t vegetarian; these were things that I could microwave in under a minute and voila- lunch!), baked tofu (made by his grandma – not me. I didn't do it right - not that I wanted to. I'm not very fond of baked tofu), grapes, apples, if cut very thin and with the skin off, peanut butter sandwiches, grilled cheese, and pizza. Maybe yogurt, if I got the right kind (vanilla Yoplait, if I remember correctly). Oh, and McDonald’s food, of course, lest you think the kid was a vegetarian or a health nut. He’d eat that, as well as any kind of cookie, cake, or chip he could find.

So there wasn’t much variety to what he was eating, and what was worse, he ate almost none of it.

Things started to change when he was about 5, and now that he’s 7 he eats a lot. He is a growing boy, after all. He says he’s hungry all the time. Plus, he eats a much better variety. That’s due to his dad and me putting our collective feet down about the subject. About half-way through his third year we quit cooking him special meals and he was forced to eat (or not) what we ate.

That’s what we with Little J now: feed him what the rest of us eat. I do find myself holding back certain part of the meal for last, however. Usually it’s the carbohydrate portion of the meal. If you give him dinner that’s zucchini, chicken, and potato, he’ll eat the potato and call it done. Or if he is served noodles, green beans, and a pork chop – it’s the noodles he goes for. Unless we tell him he has to eat the meat on his burger he'll only eat the bun. He's a carbohydrate addict. So we give him fewer of those and seconds only if he finishes the rest.

Seconds? Who are we kidding?