On Parenting...

Amazing piece on being a father by Stack Overflow creator Jeff Atwood: http://blog.codinghorror.com/on-parenthood/

A design pattern to make your toddler eat?

In software programming we have design patterns to solve recurring and frequently occurring problems. I wonder if anyone discovered a design pattern to make your toddler eat?

Courtesy here

Found the picture on the web, I bet the food or may be the entire bowl was courtesy Photoshop :). Rarely have I seen Avani happy about eating. In fact when she's extremely hungry she gets super cranky and well not excited (I wish) at the sight of food.

A usual meal follows this sequence:

1. Ask her if she's wants to eat- which she says Yes
2. Get the food on the dining table
3. Before the even the first bite she will ask for "nani" (Jump to step 8 for explanation :)
4. Coax, plead to eat
5. May take couple of bites and stop
6. Then make light threats "bahar leke nahi jayenge", "garden jaana hai na" etc for the next few bites
7. Stop again - at this point nothing works
8. Show her favorite video "Nani teri morni ko mor le gaye" on phone. After this its relatively smooth till she's really full. Lately she has been asking for specific videos! (Batameez, Kathi, Chidiya/Aunty, Monkey, Jimmy)

We have been trying to get her to like and enjoy her food (without using distractions) - hopefully we'll get there at some point!