Funny you should mention the strongly-flavored foods. Back in the day, J-Man used to sneak things like those habanero Doritos that would about rot my mouth out, but he would eat them without blinking. Of course, he would be up half the night with a tummy ache, which was why we had to hide all that stuff. But he did obviously like the taste.

We also used to dump lemon juice in green vegetable purees to get him to eat them. And before he’d actually put stuff in his own mouth, he would lick the salt off of everything and then hand it back to you without actually eating it. Mary would be an addict of salt and vinegar chips if we kept them in the house much. I personally find them repulsive, but Mary likes her the salt too. Clearly she and J-Man are related!

So obviously he likes the strong sensory stuff; you just have to get him to actually put it in his mouth and eat it. It’s just hard to get past his outer defenses, and that seems to be getting harder.

We gave up for a while introducing new foods because it was so stressful and we were trying to concentrate on other areas like speech and social interaction. You can only tackle so many things at once. But we’re now in diet improvement mode again and are taking suggestions from everyone.

As we said, the peaches were a disaster, but admittedly they are kinda slimy – his absolute least favorite texture. So we switched to hamburger (crumbled up, no buns or added flavorings) and he actually is starting to eat a few bites. Yay!

I think he would go back and start eating apple slices again, but he eats about a gallon of applesauce a day it seems so we’d like to find at least some other fruit he’ll eat. So far, no luck. If our current experiment with hamburger proves successful, we may try yogurt next. That should be a real adventure, but it would be nice to get all the good things yogurt has into his body to balance out his diet a little.

Right now he only drinks somewhat-sweetened iced tea, which I know is a capital offense across the pond, but they don’t call it “the house wine of the South” for nothing here. I would like to get him to drinking milk – heck I’d settle for water – so that’s probably going to be soon on our experiment list.

We offer him our table food most meals, but he rarely even touches it. He touched the garlic bread last night, but clearly the greasiness of the top of the bread was not something he cared for so he wiped his hands repeatedly and walked away.

We appreciate hearing everyone’s eating trials, tribulations, and successes. We’ve been struggling with this since he was nine months old, and it’s been slow, slow going. It’s been very helpful hearing what others have tried, and comparing notes has given us new ideas.

Thanks for your comment. Now that you’re no longer a lurker, comment some more! We’d love to hear from you.

@Blake – yeah, I don’t think peaches are going to be his thing. He tolerated them as puree, but didn’t love them like he did the applesauce. Maybe we’ll try something not wet and slimy for a while…

I love your description of J-Man’s reaction. Good luck with the peaches!

He’s going to love enchiladas…..

Absent that, if the peaches were mashed up or pureed or what not, like the texture of applesauce, do you think he’d go for it?