Tomato Ketchup and Strawberries

When Raiyan first started weaning, I put my Gina Ford Contented Baby Cook Book to good use and for all of its worth. I practically tried out every recipe in it and was so satisfied and pleased with myself when Raiyan would clean his plate after every meal. And when he weighed around 10kg at 10 months, he usually did.

Then came the time when he would become fussy about a lot of things and this included his food too. Every time we keep trying to introduce him to new food he would just refuse to take it. When he refused any kind of sweets or cakes, we thought that Jeff’s secret wish for him to do so actually came true (Jeff is a dentist..). But of course now that we know it is an autistic trait, it is more because of his reluctance to open up to new things rather than his desire to maintain his dental health (following Miriam Stoppard’s advice, we didn’t introduce sugar till about the time he was 18 months).

So began his new food routine of a rotation of spaghetti Bolognese, rice with ayam kicap, rice with chicken soup and rice with kari ayam, all of these loaded with Heinz tomato ketchup and followed by a ball of fresh strawberries EVERY SINGLE MEAL TIME. Since it is our nature as parents to want to ensure that he eats something, ANYTHING, we indulged him in this fixed menu for as long as we can remember.

Most of the time this ritual is tolerable because hey! As long as he is eating, even if it is the same thing every four days, it’s ok by us. But it did become troublesome when we wanted to eat out as a family (which is probably the favourite pastime of all families in Brunei!) He wouldn’t want to eat anything else but chips. So imagine that, everytime we go dining out, all he ever has is chips. Just plain, salted and fried potatoes. Chips. That’s quite worrying right? And with the amount of tomato ketchup he was eating, god knows where the excess high fructose corn syrup was going!

His daily 2 servings of strawberries, which cost $4.80 a punnet, also started to run up the grocery bills because to satisfy his needs, we were buying 8-10 punnets a week! Again, as parents, we would never shortchange our children when it comes to food, so again, we gave in and spent almost half of our weekly grocery expenditure on this exotic fruit. Another problem was because it is exotic and therefore imported, they’re only shipped over once a week so if I don’t make it to the supermarket within a day of it being shipped (which is Thursdays at Supa Save if anyone wants to know), then I’d miss the boat and would have to wait till next week to get the next batch. This means having to handle numerous tantrums at every dessert time for the rest of that week.

Until recently, when there was a point where we kept missing the boat at Supa Save and so he was really left with no choice but to eat other fruits that we have. After the initial tantrums, they became mini-tantrums and pretty soon, he was actually asking to have other fruits! We were so amazed! We found that it is possible to stop an addiction if we persevere.. he hasn’t had a strawberry in almost 3 weeks now!(trust me, for Raiyan, that seems like an eternity).

So wish us luck for tomorrow when we’re going to make the tomato ketchup disappear too! There will be tantrums but we will see through it insyaAllah! Cause one bottle costs almost 5 bucks too and he goes through 2 bottles a week! We need more money to pay for his therapy kali ah!