Has anyone else been stricken with WEIRD behavior from their kids lately?
My son, 4, has been doing this weird eating thing lately. He has always had texture issues, but he sort of outgrew them for a while… NOW they’re back! YUCK! Basically, he chooses a bite to eat, gets it in his mouth, and immediately he starts chewing slowly and I can see him pushing the food between his teeth and cheeks.. GROSS. He won’t swallow, keeps chewing, tries to put more food and drink in but never swallows. It is so.disgusting. Today we went to a Chinese restaurant and he literally had this 1/2″ by 3/4″ piece of chicken in his mouth for FORTY MINUTES. UGH! How do you explain to him what he already knows? (The sooner you swallow, the smaller the bite and quicker the offensive taste/texture goes away! He keeps it in there forever and it gets MASSIVE with all the spit and chewing. ICK.)
ALSO, a few weeks ago we were talking about how we don’t breathe when we swallow and my daughter, 6.5, decided that freaked her out. Now she’s finally weaning from the behavior, but for 2 solid weeks she would take about 45 minutes to eat about 6 bites worth of food because she was concentrating SO hard on how she was eating and freaking herself out over not breathing while swallowing. I about lost it! I kept telling her that our bodies were DESIGNED to work that way. That if she breathed in food, her body would STOP that food from going into her lungs. *Finally* she stopped doing it so often when she choked on some popcorn at a Girl Scouts meeting. She panicked, I told her to get a drink, she did… and she came back, “MY BODY DIDN’T LET IT GO IN MY LUNGS!!!! I coughed it out and swallowed!!!!” Precisely.
My 2 year old always acts like some alien. I can’t think of any new eating problem with him other than the fact that he’s eating a lot MORE lately. It’s funny to watch him out-eat his siblings every single meal. I think he takes after his daddy. 🙂
Jennifer says
Ah, the fun quirks of our babies… 🙂