Noodle Lover

Elise's favorite food is most definitely Asian noodles.  I've tried to give her different forms of pasta but she rejects all of them.  One day, my mom gave her some udon noodles and she slurped all of them up.  Today, we went to an Asian buffet restaurant (never again) and Elise just went crazy over the chow mein noodles!  She rejected at least a dozen other foods I tried to give her, but she ate a huge portion of noodles, as well as some watermelon.

I'm learning that Elise is a pretty picky eater.  I was worried about this and I fear that she will be one of those kids who will only eat mac n' cheese and chicken nuggets.  I try to offer her so many different types of foods in finger food form but she just throws it on the ground.  It is a little discouraging to go through the process of making her food only for her to reject it.  Welcome to motherhood, right?  She still eats pureed food like a champ although she should really be moving onto regular finger foods now.  I emailed her pediatrician, who said not to worry and keep offering finger foods. 

I also forgot to mention a funny incident that happened at church last Sunday.  In Little Lambs (church nursery), I"m volunteering for the month so lucky Elise gets to have mommy in the room with her.  At one point, I held another baby and Elise went CRAZY, nearly inconsolable!  It actually took her a long time to calm down.  I don't know if she felt jealous or abandoned or what.  I've never seen her like that.  For the rest of the time, she wanted to be right next to me, and she would even whimper if I even started to talk to another baby.  Wow! 

Oh, and thanks for all the comments on the working mom blog post.  Nothing like a good ol' working mom/stay-at-home mom discussion to get the comments going, haha.  I guess the grass will always be greener, right?  I'm actually reading this really interesting book right now called "Midlife Crisis at 30: How the Stakes Have Changed for a New Generation--And What to Do about It".  It really delves into our generation's "crisis" of having to negotiate the demands between marriage, kids, and working in our late 20s/early 30s. Because we're marrying later, having kids later, and have nearly equal professional opportunities as men, these advancements are actually putting women in really difficult predicaments where we're having to juggle these priorities in a way that men do not. 

I really hope that by the time Elise is 30, she will not have to struggle as much we do with these decisions.  I hope that workplaces can adopt more family-friendly policies (like a year long maternity leave and flexible schedules) and that Elise and her girlfriends will have these important discussions earlier in their development rather than in their late 20s, oftentimes when it is "too late".  We all grew up in a world where we were taught that we were exactly the same as boys and could do whatever they did, but I think in that message of total equality, it left out a crucial discussion of how something like motherhood can make our professional trajectory look a little bit different than men.