Peanut Butter Jelly Time

One of the nice things about having friends with children around Rooney's age is that we are all basically going through the same thing at the same time. We all have our "issues" with our kids, but we can pretty much relate to each other's problems.

My "problem" with Rooney has been getting him to eat solid foods. He was such a great little jarred baby food eater but once we moved on to chunkier foods he's been hesitant. I've written about little accomplishments we've made and how I have to be creative with Rooney but there are times where I have been so excited because I got Rooney to eat eggs or diced apples, and wanted to post about it. However I thought it might make for dry reading and chose not to. These events I am grateful to be able to share with my mom friends and they understand and are excited for us.

Along the eating lines, I have a Rooneyism I feel I can share with you. This definitely should have been an R2R, but I'm really the only one posting these days, so it gets its own spot. Anytime you try to feed Rooney a new food or put something on his tray to self feed he touches it with his index finger. It seems the food has to pass some sort of touch test with his highness and if the food is too soft (he does not appear to like self feeding soft foods such as peas, noodles etc.) it gets tossed to the lions (Courage & Rocco) or smeared across his tray. Often to bypass the finger test I have to sneak something into Rooney's mouth so he can taste it before automatically dismissing it and waving it away.

This approach has only been minimally successful and sometimes takes several days for one food. Last night I was able to get him to eat spaghetti easily but I have tried since last weekend to feed Rooney Sunflower Seed Butter (tastes just like PB but without the allergen worries) & jelly sandwiches. He has picked up the sandwiches, he's ignored the sandwiches, he's smeared the sandwiches across his tray, fed them to the dogs, gotten PB&J in his hair and finally yesterday, when I got a dab on his lips and then put some on a Baby Mum Mum, Rooney ate his nouveau PB&J... and loved it!