Matilda is a cheese fiend, and so far all her protein is cheese, eggs, milk and occasional chickpeas (hummus) and black beans.

She did happily chow down on a bowl of mac'n'cheese with tuna and loved every bite, but Hec pronounced the after effects unbearably foul and has decreed No More Tuna until she's potty-trained.

Mexican food?

oh my god. I forgot to add. Guacamole. honest. Kid loves the stuff. No. not me bathing in it. With rice & beans. With grilled cheese sandwich.

but no chicken. weird. because, you know. chicken tastes like everything.

Annabel used to like cheese. When she was Matilda's age, string cheese was one of her major food groups, and she'd also snack on cheddar or jack.

Now she refuses it. My only consolation is that I was extremely finicky until I turned 12 or so myself, and I'm perfectly healthy and reasonably adventurous at the table.

Yeah, green things are a challenge, but Franny will eat green beans. By splitting them and eating the wee pea pods and leaving the rest on the table. ::holds hand over eye in typical Kat fashion::

mac won't eat real cheese, but he will eat box mac-n-cheese.

favorite foods: spaghetti and meatballs from a can, mac-n-cheese, turkey burger (patty only), chicken fingers, pepperoni pizza, pepper steak beef (no veggies), Eth food (preferably not my homemade), malt-o-meal hot cereal with maple syrup, waffles, donuts, cinnamon rolls, biscuits with strawberry jelly, jello, BANANAS

I didn't like meat very much when I was younger, but a lot of that was because it was too much work. I definitely didn't like hamburgers and I know that the few times we went to McDonald's I got a filet-o'-fish. I love (good) hamburgers now.

Was it here that there was a link about kids and foods that explained that bitter was the last taste that one develops? So there is actually a reason kids often don't like certain vegetables.

"It's fuzzy puppy cuddle time, motherfuckers!"

I need this shirt. I'm also liking Jilli's idea of wearing it with a victorian jacket and petticoated skirt.

The thought of wearing it to the school and showing it to Draconian Dictator and seeing his expression also makes me so happy.

Was it here that there was a link about kids and foods that explained that bitter was the last taste that one develops? So there is actually a reason kids often don't like certain vegetables.

I don't remember seeing a specific article linked here, but I've definitely read that taste preferences for bitter and sour mostly don't develop until later in life (puberty?), so kids refusing green veggies are similar in reasonability to supertasters doing so - the broccoli really does taste that much worse to them than it does to the rest of us.. And it kind of makes sense from an evolutionary perspective - bitter and sour are flavors that plants use to tell animals not to eat them, and younger animals have more reason to avoid being poisoned than older ones.

Dylan's food options are currently limited to things that can be eaten with no teeth, but he LOVES hamburger buns with Gerber spinach puree on them. Not quite as much as he loves mangoes, but if I feed him the spinach-bread first I get to feel good about feeding him something green.

I'd heard it works differently-- that kids have a lot of taste buds like supertasters do. And we all lose taste buds as we grow, which may be the reason we develop tastes for things that would be too much or too bitter when we had more taste buds (like scotch, say).

Emmett's palate is slowly expanding - sometimes under duress. It was a huge deal to get him to eat a salad last week since he's violently anti vegetable.

He preferred hot dogs to hamburgers until fairly recently. He will eat a burrito if it is: grilled chicken, rice, cheese. No beans, no salsa, no guacamole. And I am find with feeding him that as it is relatively healthy.

We wind up eating a lot of ravioli and torellini because it's the only thing I can make that everybody in the family will eat.

Matilda's still pretty adventurous in her eating, but that often wears off in toddlerhood.