Toddler Vitamins

This girl LOVES the vitamins... can you tell?!? A few weeks ago I found a bargain on these vitamins at CVS, so I picked up a bottle for Kate. Lately she's getting a little more finicky about what she's willing to eat (started boycotting vegetables unfortunately). But now that I'm a mommy armed with vitamins, I've started only strongly encouraging her to eat her veggies instead of forcing her - thus eliminating another unnecessary battleground in our lives. Since we transitioned from baby formula I've been concerned about her nutrition and trying to get enough servings of all the food groups into her body each day, but now that she's a vitamin girl I don't feel all that pressure. I still try to feed her healthy meals, but without the stress of if she doesn't get it at this meal she's going to miss it.

The upside of the vitamins is the fact that she LOVES them, but the downside of the vitamins is also that she LOVES them! One of the very first things out of Kate's mouth in the morning is, "Can I please have my diamond?" (She can say vitamin, but most times it comes out sounding just like diamond.) I know that eating a massive amount of vitamins isn't nearly as dangerous as Tylenol or Triaminic, but it still isn't a great idea for her. I'm not worried (right now) about her climbing up on my cabinets and opening the bottle herself, my concern is that she asks about the vitamins so much that Cody and I might BOTH give her one.

We learned a valuable lesson about that this past summer. We had a little tree someone from my BSF group last year had given to us. We planted it and were so glad to have it! This summer seemed particularly hot and dry, so we had to water our tiny tree often to keep it alive. The only problem was we didn't necessarily designate a watering time or a watering person. So, as was bound to happen, one day I gave our little tree a good little drink during the day and when Cody came home from work he gave the tree a nice BIG drink... and the next day our poor little tree's leaves fell off and it died. We talked about it later because we were both so surprised it had died since we had been watering it, we realized that we were both so worried about it getting what it needed there were days we'd BOTH been watering it. Too much of anything isn't good - if it's water in a hot, dry summer or vitamins in a toddler's tummy.

So with this experience tucked under our belt, we made a pact that I will be the only one to give the girl her vitamins and vitamin time is always in the morning with breakfast. We were sad to lose our little tree this summer, but it was a great way for us to learn this lesson when it was just the life of a tree rather than that of our sweet girl being affected! I know I have so much more to learn, but I hope that the bulk of the lessons I need to learn can be at the expense of other free little tree type things rather than Kate or Cody or any other person in my life.