yum good chicken

Our second foster placement was a sweet 3 year old girl, she did not have very many words the words she did use were gibberish. Every once in awhile she would include a real word. The second day she was with us we took her over to see Grandmom Betty to have lunch. When we got in the house there was a delicious chocolate cake on the counter. At this point we have heard her say NO and point her finger at whatever she does not want. As soon as she saw the cake she clearly said, “I WANT CAKE!” We tried to get her to eat a variety of other foods and explained that once she had 1 bite of another food she could have cake. She would not budge and trying to be consistent neither would we. It was a bit scary, if we gave in to her demands on day 2 what would be ahead of us. We really had no idea how to parent this lost little girl and the one thing that stuck with me is a child will eat when they are hungry. She did not want to eat anything except for that cake so she was not really hungry. She had eaten a good breakfast and to skip lunch would not be the end of the world. The other tricky part of this was we were being watched by David’s grandmother and sometimes grandparents have a way of giving in to their grandchildren. Luckily Grandmom was on our side and months later still talked about how hard it was to see us struggling with Lily but that we did the right thing. The rest of the day involved taking Lily to the doctors office and it was not a fun visit. She was already unsure of what was going on in her life and the doctor was not very sympathetic to her situation. Since we had very little notice that Lily was going to be staying with us we decided to head to Target to buy her some clothes and necessities. She fell asleep in the car on the way home. Before dinner was even ready she climbed right up into her chair and got her utensils ready. She was hungry and boy did she eat. All through out the meal she kept saying “yum good chicken” – it was meatloaf. So for Lily we knew she would eat it as long as she thought it was chicken. She ate all of her dinner that night and finally got her cake. We still find ourselves saying “Yum good chicken!” - when we eat meatloaf. She has left an imprint on our hearts.