The *Omniverous* Ones ...

There use to be a day when our kids would eat what I'd feed them. This would be limited to breastmilk, baby cereal, vegetables and fruit. We'd also throw in some formula here and there for good measure. I was going through photos tonight and came across this one, taken in the "early days." This was about a year ago ... around the time our kids were really starting to get the hang of solids. The reason the picture is blurry is because I was moving FAST to get food shoveled in to three hungry little mouths . The rest of the pictures I'm adding in because I thought they were cute and figured this was a good opportunity to post them...



Now, our children happen to eat whatever is in their path. I say that they are "omniverous" because they are both herbivores (fruit & vegetables) and they are carniverous (meat and ... biting each other. Does this count?) The point is, this creates a whole new level of concern for me - because what they ingest during any given day ... is not necessarily limited to the food that I have provided. I've taken to calling them the "Omniverous Ones" ... not just because they are omniverous - but they also happen to be one, as in, one year old.

I've already made reference in a previous post about the snails that they've tried to eat in the backyard. I almost hurled the other day when I stopped William ... with barely a millisecond to spare ... from shoving an earthworm in his mouth. A dead and dried up earthworm, that he managed to scrape off of our patio. He held it up for me to see, before he proceeded to stick it in his mouth. I never imagined I could move so fast ... but I did. And he was extremely disappointed that I didn't let him enjoy this delicacy that he'd worked so hard for.


I got an awful bite yesterday when during our outside playtime, I noticed that William had a mouth full of ... something. That's never a good feeling when you don't know what your baby has in their mouth. Considering I didn't have any food with us - and I was pretty sure he'd finished his breakfast, an hour and a half earlier, I decided a "finger sweep" was warranted. Once again, he was very disappointed in me that I was trying to remove - what turned out to be mulch - from his gullet. He let me know that this was completely unacceptable by chomping down on my pinky finger.

Charlie and I decided to take the kids out to dinner last night. We wound up at Chevy's ... a great, family friendly, Mexican restaurant. We were sharing our chicken fajitas with the kids - tortillas, rice, beans, chicken - - good healthy stuff. Charlie was commenting how well the kids were eating - - when I happened to notice that once whole crayons ... were in pieces, scattered around the table. William looked like a chipmunk - - cheeks full, of what we had thought up until that point, was wholesome food. Because of my experience earlier in the day with the mulch - - and my pinky finger that was still throbbing - - Charlie literally 'lent a hand' and did the "finger sweep." Charlie discovered that William had chewed off the better part of red, green and yellow crayons. Today, his diaper resemebled a traffic light. (I'm noticing a re-occuring theme here with William being my *problem child* when it comes to eating whatever, whenever ... is this a boy thing?!)

What really interests me is that I will put our children in their highchairs to eat breakfast, lunch, an afternoon snack and dinner. They can usually tolerate about 20-25 minutes in their chairs before they want to be let down. Often times, in fact, most of the time ... they don't really eat a lot while in their chair. Yet, once I put them down on the ground ... and before I have an opportunity to clean the area around their highchairs ... they will be perfectly content to sit on the floor and eat all the food that they just threw off their clean tray. Throughout the course of a day ... I will clean 3 highchairs ... 4 times a day. Each cleaning takes me about 15 minutes. So, in essence - I am spending approximately 1 hour a day ... cleaning up highchairs after they eat. But, since they are so perfectly content sitting on the ground and eating food ... I can't help but wonder if it doesn't make the most logistical sense to just make sure the floor is clean - and feed them there. Would that be wrong??

The other day, while we were outside - falling all over ourselves with the safety harness fiasco ... all three of the kids zeroed in on what they thought were raisins on the side walk. In our neighborhood, springtime is the right time for millions of new bunnies to make their appearance in the world. These bunnies love eating the grass that we have along the side of our home and leaving behind little "tokens" of appreciation. These little "tokens" - it would happen to be - look like a raisin, to the undiscerning eye. And wouldn't you know ... our kids LOVE raisins. I figured out on Friday that although "No!" and "Kangaroo!" don't work to stop our kids from doing something we don't want them to do ... "OH SH*T!!!!" works like a charm. I never intended to use profanity - but, I really couldn't think of a more appropriate term to throw out ... and I guess I got lucky that it stopped my "omniverous ones", in their tracks.

Like all things ... I suppose this too, shall pass. But it really helps that they are so darn cute.