The baby's gone on Highchair Strike...

In our household we've always believed in the principle of sitting down to eat - preferably together. On the one hand it's safer; there's less risk of a little person choking if she's not wandering around the room while she eats. And on the other it's a teeny, tiny bit less messy if she's sat in one place! My least favourite meals have been the ones where Bean has been free to roam, tomato-stained fingers and all (especially as there's usually a cream sofa within grasping distance).

But in addition to this there's the social etiquette thing. A lot of our meals are family social occasions and it's soooo much nicer when she's there, part of it, and usually being the most entertaining thing at the table (because she's cute, not because we're boring, btw!!!! :-) ). It's just not the same if she keeps wandering off to play somewhere and you can almost hear the tuts at how ill-disciplined our child is if she doesn't sit nicely. After all, it's perfectly reasonable to expect a young toddler to have a two hour attention span as we all take our time on a leisurely lunch. NOT!

Up until a couple of weeks ago, however, Bean was always excellent at going into her chair, eating however much/little she wanted, and then asking for "up". Now is a different time.... Now, if she doesn't want to eat she WILL NOT go in the chair and sometimes, even if she does want to eat, she WILL NOT go in the chair (but will grab the food from the tray and run off to her Cosy Coupe and eat it in there!). We're talking screams of "noooooo", legs kicking all over the place, arched back, the works.

So we've tried the following:
1) Put her in anyway.
My least favourite solution as it involves holding her tightly and somehow manhandling her into place. She doesn't like it, I don't like feeling like I'm forcing her, and it rarely results in her eating. So after 2 or 3 attempts at this we abandoned this tack as too unpleasant and against our parenting beliefs.

2) Tell her no chair, no food.
And off she runs happily to play, confident that there's always copious streams of breastmilk should she feel hungry later on.....including at midnight, 2am, 3am, 430am........ I'm now too tired to continue with this option! :-/

3) Let her eat picnic style....
....as long as it's not anything runny! Generally this would only apply to tea time anyway, which she has generally remained ok about going into her highchair for. So increasingly her breakfast has been croissant-type things and fruit, while lunch has been slices of ham, chunks of cheese, breadsticks and more fruit. We're ok with this one, as long as she shows she can still "do" proper sitting down meals, which brings us to.....

4) Let her sit at the table on a proper seat
After all, this is the crux of it really. She may only be titchy, but she's decided she's all grown up! In the car, she wants to sit on a proper seat with a proper seat belt (obviously not possible!), and for mealtimes she wants to sit on a proper chair like Mummy and Daddy. Out and about this works fine. Lots of places have comfy bucket-style armchairs that she can safely sit on, but at home we have standard open-sided dining chairs. But we have found a few ways of making her Big Girl dreams come true...

Firstly, we got her a child's table and chair for the kitchen where she can eat her breakfast (for 5min before she gets up and finishes it off picnic style)

Secondly, we put one dining chair against the wall and sat her on it, and then put my chair right against the other side. She stayed there for about 7min :-)

And then finally we got our Amazing Travelling Highchair (see earlier posts) and put that on one of the seats. I was far from convinced it would work - after all it's still a highchair of sorts - but so far so good! No kicking and screaming sitting on it and no getting down to wander around all the time. She's not using the tray so she eats from the table like the rest of us and for now, that seems to be good enough for Bean.

Winner!