WFMW - The Humble Cocktail Stick

Poor little cocktail stick, taken for granted.

This little wooden stick has really come into its own in the last few weeks. Toots has been off her food since coming out of full time daycare. She's a very social eater and was always a lot happier eating in company, especially if that company happened to be kids her own age so its been a little difficult to get her to eat regularly since the start of the year.

I was at the end of my tether, although I knew that she would eat when she was hungry I felt awful watching her eat a quarter slice of toast for breakfast or three mouthfuls of pasta at lunchtime and claim she was full up.

I'd tried everything, sandwiches cut with cookie cutters into cute little hearts and stars, painting smiley faces with an edible ink pen on the side of cherry tomatoes, I even resorted to that novelty convenience food, you know the ones turkey dinosaurs and such. 1% turkey, 99% water and sawdust.

Then a little over three weeks ago she went to a birthday party with my mum and she noticed that the mother of the birthday girl had made a load of mini cocktail sausages, red Leicester and cheddar cheese cubes and big bowls of fruit salad. The thing is she had set out a big glass full of swizzle sticks for the kids to skewer the food and Toots was absolutely hoovering it up. My mum said she completely stuffed herself and almost wasn't able to play on the bouncy castle.

For a few days I put it down to the fact that she had been surrounded by other kids and her social eating had kicked in again, even though my mum kept insisting it was the swizzle sticks. After a couple of days of being back to square one I figured it couldn't hurt to give it a go.

I took a few bog standard cocktail sticks.


Then I made little balls of playdough and stuck them on top of the cocktail sticks, leaving them over night for the dough to dry. The little balls work perfectly, they dried solid with a little hole to allow me to replace the cocktail sticks.

Best of all Toots is back to eating what I would consider to be a full meal for a preschooler and she's also asking for snacks in between.

It also seems that the old saying "the more you eat, the more you want" is very true for Toots because once she was eating larger portions with the cocktail stick, she started to actually enjoy her food again and hasn't really bothered with the cocktail sticks in the last few days, she just wants the food now.

And I'm a very happy mummy again.

All thanks to that little cocktail stick.

Cocktail sticks definitely work for me.

Its Kristen of We are THAT family's first week hosting Works for Me Wednesday, hopefully with many more to come. Head on over (or back) and say Hi.