A love/hate relationship with food

Here at the O'Neal household, we don't openly encourage eating disorders. Both Dada and I are relatively slender people, but we like our food. My friend Sara often tells me that she likes me because I'm a girl who's not afraid to put away a tall stack of pancakes. We are also doing better about eating a variety of things in front of the boys, like more fruits and vegetables, since I grew up and started eating green things. My mom would be so proud that I eat salad now.

Lately, however, we have had some struggles with the boys in the eating department. It is solely my duty in the house to be the Keeper of the Boy-Meals, so when they start slacking on their end, I start stressing.

We started Jacob on solids at 5 months. We did rice cereal for about 4 days, and it was all going so well that I tried bananas. He liked those, so three days later I tried peaches. Jacob seemed to be souring on the peaches after the first day, so I tried sweet potatoes, which he didn't like at all. Then carrots, pears, and applesauce in rapid succession, each of which he seemed interested in the first time, but then never again. Finally it got to the point where Jacob wouldn't even eat the bananas that started it all; he would sit in his chair with his mouth closed and scream as I would repeatedly poke his lips with the spoon. And atop all this, he was developing the horrendous contact rash on his cheeks that plagued his older brother for the entire timehe was spoon-fed.

So I stopped feeding him solids for a week. He's kind of old, but not that old, and I figured we weren't going to get anywhere with me trying to give him a panic disorder every time his high chair tray clicked in place. I wasn't sure what to do, when Meemaw Ross suggested we forget this whole fruit/veggie thing and just go back to cereal for awhile. "Remember when you started Isaac on solids? You guys were so cautious that I think you fed him nothing but rice cereal for a month."

This is his fifth day on just oatmeal, and things are improving by leaps and bounds every day. The first day, he was excited to get back in the chair and gnaw on the spoon containing that mushy goo with the overarching taste of boobie juice. Every day thereafter, he's put down two, sometimes three bowls (~4 or 5 oz) of oatmeal at one sitting. Back to basics was apparently the key.

But I also have my mommy tricks up my sleeve. He still purses his lips shut and won't let me shove a spoon through, so I move the spoon over to his hand and he quickly grabs it and shoves it in his mouth. Already we see a streak of "I do it myself" in this one. He gets so wrapped up in chewing on the spoon that, if I get another, I can dole out some fresh stuff and draw his attention away from the empty spoon with a full one -- that way he never frets about me taking His Spoon away. I am particularly proudest of his newly soft and silky cheek skin, my mommy coup de grace. I got him to help me with that. About halfway through his meal, when he gets tired of playing the spoon-switcheroo, I give him a warm, wet washcloth to chew on, and he mops his face clean for me.

But while Jacob is learning to love eating, Isaac is increasingly resentful of it. He vastly prefers to drink warm milk instead of eating -- he probably drinks upwards of 5 or 6 cups a day, and would drink more if I didn't issue some sort of threats about eating real food instead. Here is a complete list of things I know Isaac will eat at least one bite of:

*yogurt
*graham crackers
*pancakes and/or waffles
*buttered bread
*canned green beans
*noodles from Progresso chicken noodle soup (but not chicken)
*McDonald's cheeseburgers (but not Wendy's, and not homemade)
*hot dogs, buns separately
*Spaghettios with meatballs
*scrambled eggs
*pretzels
*Goldfish
*pickles
*grapes
*strawberries
*apples
*oranges and clementines, but not orange juice
*teeth rotting, sugar-laden snacks of any kind

No more pasta, no more mac-n-cheese. We've tried peanut butter, but he screams and forcibly scrapes it from his mouth should it but touch his tongue. No protein that is not full of mystery meat and preservatives or dairy-derived. He also won't eat cheese. Or pizza. Or anything that is remotely new to his palate. Each night, I fix two dinners -- one for Dada and I, and one for the increasingly picky toddler. I try to put a little of what we are having on his plate, and he usually screams at me to get it off, lest it taint his precious strawberries with its New Food cooties.

I am getting increasingly closer to my wit's end with him. It seems like he shuns another standby almost daily now -- yesterday he barely picked at his grilled cheese sandwich, insisting that I should remove the "yellow water" that lay betwixt his sliced of bread. He eats his daily vitamin, but I can't help thinking that his near-complete lack of lean meat and veggies is seriously unhealthy, though his 2-year blood test showed that he was not anemic. To hammer the nail in his anorexic coffin, his babysitter came over on Friday after a two-week absence and declared, "He looks skinny!" Thanks, ho-bag.

What should I do? Does anybody have any suggestions about how to present things to him that might coerce him into eating, or ideas for food that he might not find repulsive? I know toddlers are notoriously picky eaters, but to me, this seems a little extreme.