I have a flashlight

and I'm still working on warding off those darn monsters...

Day three of my recent panic over Miss Sunshine's weight gain has commenced, and is now nearly over. Yesterday was quite the adventure, I must say. She ate hugely at breakfast - half a banana and two full size pancakes. Didn't eat much more than a bite or two of mac and cheese for lunch, had fruit snacks while picking big brother up from school, followed by some animal crackers and a granola bar upon our arrival home and refused to eat dinner last night. Threw a full on screaming meme fit at the dinner table, which prompted Mommy to inform her that she could either eat her dinner or go to bed. Which prompted more screaming on the part of Miss Sunshine, which thereby caused Mommy to take her out of her booster seat and deposit her in her bed. Where she remained, still screaming, until Daddy finished dinner. He then went, got her, got her to eat about half the bowl of tuna casserole I had made for dinner, and then went about our regular bedtime routine. SIGH.

We are getting lots of well meaning advice from various family members over this subject. Some feel that we are letting her "graze" too much throughout the day, so she is never really getting hungry enough for an actual meal, and that we should refuse her the snacks and allow her to only eat at mealtime. Some feel that we should simply feed her what she wants, when she wants, if our ultimate goal is to get her to gain weight. And still others think that while we should feed her when she wants fed, we should give her limited options rather than letting her dictate what she is eating. Daddy Mac and I lean most strongly toward the third option as far as things are going. At this point, we simply want her to gain. If the best way to get her to do this is to feed her randomly throughout the day, then we are all for that. However, we don't want her to develop a habit of simply eating nothing but junk all day, either. So for now, we will continue to offer items like granola bars, yogurt, fruits and veggies when she goes on an "Eat eat" kick (as she says), and continue to stress that she needs to eat at least some of her meal as well.

Implementing that approach, things went much better today. She had two small pancakes for breakfast, ate a small bowl of mac and cheese at lunch, had some animal crackers for an afternoon snack, and ate a full piece of pepperoni pizza as well as two slices of cinnamon dessert pizza for dinner tonight. Perhaps not the healthiest of food options, but better than the cookies and cake she was begging for during the day. We shall keep struggling through this.

In the meantime, I'm still looking for the batteries, because the light from this flashlight is still rather dim and I'm pretty sure there is still a monster under my bed...