Catholic Dads

You think you’re stubborn?

I’m not. At least, I started out compliant and credulous and utterly malleable, and developed stubborness (as much as I could manage) in an environment of abuse.

Marisa never learned to be stubborn, and may God grant she never has to.

Liam more than makes up for it. We want him to learn to feed himself. (He’s got a deadline of March, or whenever #2 gets here. I do not want to be dealing with a newborn and having to put each bite into Liam’s mouth.) But his response has been, when we put a spoon in his hand, to push his arm out wide, lock his elbow, turn his face the other way, and scream!

For finger food, he has the same reaction. Pull the hand back, reject the food, object to the whole process.

So Saturday, we took a tip from Miss Donna (the helper who at one meal wouldn’t put his cup into his mouth till he touched it — and now he always reaches for it), and decided to make him eat some of his meal with both finger food in his fingers, and him holding his spoon. I prepared for a weekend battle.

I got one.

…except that(on the spoon issue) it only lasted one day. Now, you put that spoon in his hand and he pulls it into his mouth, and says, do it faster! faster! faster! As you might expect, it’s a horrific mess: rice all over the table and floor at lunch; plate thrown on the floor at dinner… well, the speech therapist said he needs to learn to play with his food! We knew it was coming.

But what I wasn’t prepared for was it working so quickly! Now we have to get him to use the spoon to pick up the food. He doesn’t get that yet — because we didn’t show him.

When we try — maybe tomorrow — he’ll say, That’s offensive! No! What are you doing? Help!

And then, we hope, he’ll learn to do that too. Wish us luck.

This post originally appeared at Letters to Liam.

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