It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no secret that my eldest son is a bit of a picky eater. Preschoolers are notoriously fussy eaters, and as long as nobody tells Simon the omnivore that, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all good.<\/p>\n
What might qualify as a little more quirky is Tristan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s predilection for food shaped like the alphabet. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s beginning to look like a bit of an obsession.<\/p>\n
It started innocuously enough with letter pretzels<\/a>. I was looking for an alternative to the ubiquitous goldfish, and aside from the salt, these pretzels are a reasonably healthy little snack. They are also Tristan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s absolute favourite food on the planet, and have been for close to three years.<\/p>\n It only took me about two years for me to figure out, Hey \u00e2\u20ac\u201c if he likes letter pretzels, maybe he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll like letter shaped pasta, too. And so I bought a can of Alphaghetti, and he gobbled the entire bowl down. (I searched high and low for a link to Alphaghetties, but apparently everyone\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s favourite neon orange letter pasta doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t exist on the Interweb.) And Nancy, you will be so proud to hear that I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even wash the tomato sauce off of them first. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve come a long way \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and gone through a lot of washcloths- from the days when I used to suck the tomato sauce off the ravioli bits before giving it to my toddlers.<\/p>\n Somewhere along the way, we added \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcletter cookies\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 to his list of favourite foods. \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcLetter cookies\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 is what Tristan \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and now Simon – calls the Loblaw\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s knockoff version of Oreo cookies, called Eat the Middle First<\/a>. (Letter cookies because, well, they have letters on them.)<\/p>\n Last month, in a stunning cognitive leap, I rediscovered Alpha-Bits<\/a> cereal. Of course, Tristan adores them. He wants them first thing in the morning as a dry snack, and he wants them again with milk for breakfast. And he must tell me all the letters that every single spoon-or-handful contains.<\/p>\n So now that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve discovered a theme that is working for us, do you have any suggestions? It would probably be a good idea for me to invest in some letter-shaped cookie cutters. Think those things would cut through a steak, or a piece of chicken? Anybody know where I can get letter-shaped carrots, or broccoli?<\/p>\n (Edited on January 27 to add: if you’ve ever had a picky eater, you MUST peek over at Nancy’s blog <\/a>for a few suggestions on how to make an ordinary lunch extraordinary. I’m not sure whether I feel incredibly inadequate or extremely excited to have a bunch of great new ideas. I’ll let you know whether they pass the “Eww, I’m not eating THAT!” picky preschooler test.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no secret that my eldest son is a bit of a picky eater. Preschoolers are notoriously fussy eaters, and as long as nobody tells Simon the omnivore that, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all good. What might qualify as a little more quirky is Tristan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s predilection for food shaped like the alphabet. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s beginning to look like a … Continue reading “Alphabet boy”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}