Toddler Eating Disorder?

Our Allie at 19 months, once grabbed a small red bag today, and announced, "Bye!" We asked her where she was going. "Gym!" (You're going to the gym?) Excitedly, "Yeah!!!" (What are you going to do at the gym?) "Ball!!! Pool!!! Bye!" And off she trotted into the other room, more motivated than most adults would be headed off to the same destination. We'd created a little monster.

Allie is a tiny little pixie, with gigantic espresso colored eyes, and eyelashes so long that mascara will be optional for her. At one point she dipped below 3rd percentile in growth, earning her the dubious diagnosis of "failure to thrive." Her developmental milestones were always on track, if not a little ahead, but she didn't sprout a single tooth until well over a year old, and at 1 1/2 years, could still wear 6-12 month sized clothes. She never drank more than 2 ounces at a time from a bottle, even when she was 8-10 months old, and supposedly at her peak milk consumption. Her head on the other hand, was weighing in at 97%ile. She was like a giant lollipop with two sticks for legs. (We actually had to go to a pediatric neurosurgeon for a head MRI and a consultation for what thankfully was all just big juicy normal brain.) But, she still wasn't eating enough.

Drastic measures had to be taken. We found all sorts of ways to add calories to her food. We added formula to her breastmilk, and flax seed oil and fish oil to her baby food. When we ate out, her food was liberally buttered, and I sometimes would feed her actual teaspoons of butter, dipped in sugar. We fried her cheerios in butter and sugar and cinnamon. She LOVED these, with good reason. They are far superior to regular cheerios, but probably lose some of their "heart healthy" qualities when you make them this way. Fattening her diet this way had the simultaneous effect of minimizing the amount of fruits and vegetables that she was able consume over the course of the day, and as she grew, I fretted about her vitamins and minerals and cholesterol and diabetes and obesity risk. We started sneaking bits of spinach and other vegetables in with her bites, and every meal was focused around how much and how well she ate. I was convinced that if she ever developed an eating disorder, that any psychologist worth their salt would be able to trace it back to these early developmental years, where we used food as a reward for eating her food.

In the meantime, due to my post-pregnancy bovine attributes, I had a freezerful of breastmilk that was being used up very very slowly. At her rate of consumption, she would likely still be using it in high school to cream her coffee. (In my mental image, it is decaf, since everyone knows caffeine stunts your growth. But given that we live in the northwest, where Starbucks started, I couldn't imagine that she wouldn't be drinking coffee by the time she was a teenager.) I decided to start making breastmilk ice cream. We had an old ice cream maker, so I used the milk, a couple scoops of formula, a dollop of flax seed oil, and a serving of fruity baby food to give it some flavor. Michael was initially very excited that I was making ice cream, but upon further investigation, declined to sample it. Guests poking around in the freezer for dessert had to be warned. It was a running joke for a long time, but ultimately was resoundingly successful, and enabled Allison to finally finish off all the milk. Now she is a fantastic milk drinker, and can chug down a sippy cup of milk faster than her brother. We buy it at the grocery store, and it's really liberating not to have to do anything special to it.

And of course, we finally found a balance, and got it all worked out. She now hovers around 10-15%ile for weight, and has a great appetite in general. Although she once declared, "Butter is my favorite vegetable!", she eats endless quantities of fruit and fights with her brother over who gets to eat the last few leaves of salad. While I still try to make sure she has a balanced meal, if she has one meal that's a little light on the green stuff, I don't lose sleep over it anymore. I doubt that she'll ever need to buy pants with "tall" inseams, but that will only make shopping easier for her. Now if only we could borrow her enthusiasm for going to the gym...