Dessert Times Five

Doof has always been weird about eating. I cannot tell you the hours we have wasted as a family and as individuals sitting at the table waiting for Doof to eat, talking about whether he will eat this or that, talking about why he has these weird habits, planning new ways to get him to eat, etc. It is exhausting and I know better than to pay this much attention to it. I know that I cannot make him eat and that he will eat when he's hungry, but because I am a behaviorist at heart, I cannot stop myself from thinking about ways to condition him to do as I like.

It started years ago when Doof was in foster care. He was a sick little baby and was undergoing chemotherapy for a rare blood disease by the time he was thirteen months old. Side effects of chemo include the likely possibility of developing sores inside your mouth. Food starts to have a very different taste. Meat can taste especially bad and other things have no taste at all. This chemo treatment continued for more than a year, and then he had a bone marrow transplant. By the time it was all over and he was released from the hospital, he was two and a half years old. I guess it was the sores in his mouth, but this could would eat hardly anything. The only thing we could really count on was that he would never turn down a bottle of PediaSure. Besides PediaSure, orange Popsicles, sour cream and onion Pringles, chicken nuggets,  mashed potatoes, and ketchup squeezed from packets, the kid ate nothing. No vegetables and barely any meat for more than a year. Gross.

So, here we are, five years later and we are still thinking and talking about food all the time. He is small for his age and the three year old down the street weighs almost as much as he does. The endocrinologist is worried about his growth and has advised us to give him high calorie snacks before bed. Great. Sure, Doof, you can have a peanut butter and jelly and five cookies and a milkshake right before bed even though I just had to spent thirty minutes threatening you just to get you to eat your dinner. Here, son. Enjoy. It just goes against every logical bone in my body. But, I guess Doof has to grow. For now. After he's back on a growing trend, he'll eat WHATEVER I SAY.