A win is a win

Keegan is all over the place with her eating. For the most part she eats really well and a lot of times we laugh because we will tell her "No, you cannot eat more fruit or vegetables until you eat a bite of your pizza (or something else equally junk foodie)". Sometimes though, that little girl digs her heels in and says, nope I'm gonna do this on my terms. We don't usually make huge deals out of them eating. We try to get them to try everything on their plate and usually leave it at that. We don't want to force food on them and we are trying to establish healthy eating patterns now. Occasionally we do try and get them to eat certain foods or to try additional bites of the food on their plates. 

Tonight was a night that we were pushing food a little more aggressively since both girls hadn't had much of a decent meal over the weekend. They were way too excited for and from the party to eat anything of substance yesterday and were tuckered out from church for much of a lunch today. So we tried to make sure the girls took a couple extra bites of food this evening. We were mainly focusing on Keegan eating green beans since we only have to tell Mac to eat a certain number of bites of food and she will usually wolf it down so she can play. Keegan doesn't operate that way and will put up a pretty good fight. After a handful of unsuccessful methods of bribing, it dawned on me how much Keegan likes to count. So we laid out the green beans and had her count one-two-three. She squealed with delight and then gobbled them up. We repeated this method a few times and she ate up each and every one. Then we started making letters with the little bits of green beans and singing the Leap Frog Letter Factory sounds song for each letter as she ate them up. We were quite pleased with our small victory today. Who knew that in order to coerce your kid to eat some food, all you needed to do was to incorporate learning and school!!!