How to quietly starve your children

Apparently I haven't been giving Baby A enough to eat in the mornings.

In my own defense, I think this is a recent phenomenon. She is a little girl. As in, petite, she's tiny. She's two and still wears 12 and 12-18 month sized clothes. She's just little.

She's a very good eater in terms of the variety of things that she eats happily and that we feed her regularly. She gets lots of vegetables, lots of fruit, lots of good healthy snacks, and yes, she gets a cookie if she eats all her dinner. However, she is also not an over eater. She stops when she's full and every once in a while I over do it in terms of what I sit her down with for a meal. So, I get into a routine of quantity and apparently forget that she is actually still growing and as she grows, will need more food to sustain that.

Baby A has been rather cranky lately at Mama T's. Everything has been a battle and all this week she's just been unhappy.

The other morning my husband made her breakfast, which he does occasionally. He eats oatmeal many mornings and adds peanut butter, honey and sliced bananas to it. Baby A loves this. So that morning he made her usual amount and she scarfed it down before I managed to finish my own bowl of cereal. That evening my husband and I laughed about it and thought, well, maybe we need to give her a larger portion.

So the next morning my husband increased the quantity. She ate it all. Not as fast as the smaller portion and there was definitely a little slow down at the end, but she ate it all.

I got a text and a picture from Mama T:

Having a Happy Day!

Wow, do I feel like such a crappy mother. 

To be fair, it's not like I'm not feeding her. She's getting a bowl of cheerios with banana sliced into it, or an english muffin, or about 1/2 a cup of plain greek yogurt with another 1/2 a cup of granola mixed in. Plus a full glass of milk. 

So, I raided allrecipes.com for some more healthy, mildly sweet, breakfast options that I can start adding to her diet since she clearly is needing something more filling.

This whole parenting 'learn as you go' thing can really suck sometimes.