Sugar freaks

In the blink of an eye our baby is six months old. It was only yesterday that we were bringing him home from the hospital in baggy newborn sleep suits. Now those clothes look like they wouldn’t cover one leg.
After six months of a pure liquid diet the little man is sampling the delights of solid foods – well mushed foods to be precise. We’ve had bananas, pureed apples, pears, sweet potatoes and rice. The trick is, experts say, to introduce as many foods as possible slowly to see what they like.
Although we’ve been on this food trip for just 10 days I’ve already discovered that he’s a spud freak. From country stock you see, quarter Donegal, he knows what’s good for him. None of this fancy pureed butternut squash and chickpea risotto for him – plain spud, no nonsense and he’s happy.
Of course the spud mania will last only as long as we keep sweety related incidents out of his life. It will only take one mouthful of cake or a crumb of chocolate biscuit to turn him from a placid cutie into a cookie monster.
People may call me an organic nerd but I care what goes into my kid’s systems. They never have soft drinks, ready meals or junk food. I’m not a total anti-chocolate dictator but sweet consumption is kept to a bear minimum.
We managed to keep our middle boy Caolan away from sweet stuff until his first birthday. The child was breastfed, weaned on organic vegetables and fed fresh homemade meals until he was one year old. On his first birthday he made a break for it and fell face first into a big sticky birthday cake, managing to consume three or four mouthfuls before we brought him up for air.
God help us that was the very minute our child’s world became a galaxy of delicious sugar laced flavours and day the ‘give me more’ nagging started.
“More sweets, more cake, more juice, more ice cream, more of them round jammy things with the stuff on them that looks like jam, and has that jam stuff in the middle (jammy dodgers)..”
Our two older kids are practically wheelie bins, bottomless pits with regards food consumption. They are what they laughingly call ‘hungry’ on average every 16 minutes, even after meals. I notice it coincides with advert breaks for junk food on the TV, so in line with my new zero tolerance approach the TV will have to go the way of the toy cars who blare ‘Who Let the Dogs Out and the Bob the Builder telephone who annoyingly inquires ‘Can We Build It?’ at 3am and can’t be switched off. We’ll bury them in the back garden for future generations to dig up and enjoy. We’ll think of it as our contribution to world history.