All Aboard!

So I'm trying once again to post a bit more frequently about our days, instead of having to write out long posts that take forever. So here it goes... :-)

Today was huge in our world. Caleb did 2 major things-
1. He pretended that he was a train conductor and took Sadie and I on a tour of the states.
2. He tried a tiny bit of pork chop and kept it down. Plus, he decided that he liked pork chops.

Now for any other child this might not be huge. In fact, Sadie often is a different character every hour of the day and she also tried pork chops tonight. But for Caleb, these things are more challenging. Caleb has been insisting that he is Policeman Caleb since he was 2.5. No matter what the game of pretend we are playing. It took us months to get him to let us pretend to be different things (I thought I was forever going to be Ballerina Mommy). We've tried lots of things to help him with this but nothing worked.

So the boy wants to be a policeman. What's the big deal? Well, it's not really but our little man is spending more and more time interacting with other kids and we've had situations where the kids want to pretend one thing and The Policeman doesn't fit in. This is a part of play and a part of socializing that the little man needs to learn and it's huge to see him take that step today.

And the pork chop... well, everyone knows a picky kid and funny, we've learned that pickiness is contagious. Caleb has also had eating issues. Right after turning 1, he went from eating everything to only eating a handful of things. It's a little more than just being picky. Even when the boy wants to try something, he will gag and vomit either as soon as he puts it in his mouth or even after he's managed to get something down. It makes mealtimes rather stressful. And as I mentioned, it's contagious. The little princess sees that brother gets special meals and doesn't have to eat what Mommy and Daddy eat, so she throws a fit.

This week we decided to try something new- a food chart. I read this somewhere and thought it might work. The kids each have a chart with 3 columns- Foods that I like, Foods that I tried, Foods that I don't like. They can put anything in the I like columns but for the dislike column, they can only put something there if they've already tried it and marked it in the tried column. And of course there is a reward. We tried having the same reward for each kid but our kids are motivated by different things. If Sadie tries 10 different foods, she gets a trip to Bruster's for ice cream. If Caleb tries 10 things, he gets a Captain America action figure. I'm really praying that this continues to work. It would be lovely to only have to cook one meal an evening instead of 3- what andy eats, what i can eat, and what the kids can eat.

Okay, so this hasn't been a really short post but maybe I'll get better. Now, a photo from this evening. This is where we found Sadie sleeping. Too cute :-)