I was so smug when it came to my first daughter.
She practically bounced out of me, raw oyster in hand. This child would eat anything and everything by the time she was a year old, from sushi to French onion soup to mussels. On her second birthday, we celebrated with a feast of sashimi, raw oysters and Russian borscht?just a few of her favorite foods.
?It?s because we introduced her early to all the food, and never ordered off the kids? menu,? I told anyone and everyone who would listen. ?In fact, she?s never even tried a chicken nugget.?
Someone should have punched me in the face, but karma came for me instead.
When it came to my second child, another daughter, I started her on solids in the same way: Homemade purées filled with beets, bananas, avocados and weird combos of all of the above, just to get her used to exotic food combinations. But she wasn?t having any of it.
The faces she made when I tried shoving chickpea purees into her mouth were as if I was feeding her a blend of dirt and rat poison. She literally scraped her tongue to remove the butternut squash I had lovingly roasted, peeled, cooled and pureed for her. And when I offered her some fish" If she could talk, I wouldn?t want to know the obscenities that surely would have come flying out of her tiny mouth.
It?s not that she didn?t have an appetite. At six months old, she most certainly loved to eat, as evidenced by her rolls and rolls of thighs and her spirited tantrums when my breast didn?t reach her m...