Please help me expand my toddler's diet!

When I started DS on solids he ate fabulously - all homecooked stuff, wide variety of veggies and meat, little baby casseroles etc. He was never keen on finger food and lumpy food and when he got close to 12 months I was starting to get worried about what the MCHN would say, and he wasn't making any attempt to feed himself.

So I decided to push hard with finger food and introduced a fork. He loved this and immediately refused to eat anything from a spoon, nothing saucy or vaguely sloppy looking, it had to be a shape that he could stab with a fork. We went through a period where we could still get stuff into his mouth by alternating a mouthful of yoghurt with a mouthful of food but that soon stopped. And many of the foods he had mashed up he wouldn't eat in "solid" form, IYKWIM.

He is now 22 months and has what I consider to be a pretty limited menu. He goes to bed at 6pm so he doesn't eat dinner with us at all. I am heartily sick of it and I also don't want a really fussy eater.

He eats:

Baked beans
Toast or sandwiches with butter and vegemite (I only give him grain bread and he doesn't like white bread). Sometimes toasted ham and cheese sandwiches (if left to go cold). No other type of sandwich.
Raisin bread
Sultana Bran
Dry Weetbix
Yoplait Petit Miam
All Bran with milk
Apples - sometimes and only a few bites. No other fresh fruit.
Tinned pineapple
Tinned beetroot (his absolute fave - never rejects this)
Cherry tomatoes
Cucumber
Cheese
Crackers
Fish fingers
Crumbed chicken fingers
Roast potato (if I cut into chip shape so he can dip into tomato sauce)
Frozen peas, corn, carrot combo
Spinach (if mixed in with homemade cheese sauce for macaroni and cheese)
Homemade bolognaise sauce with veggies snuck in
LOVES his milk

I do sometimes give him about 3cms of juice in the bottom of a cup because his fruit intake is so low - just to get some kind of fruit vitamins/pulp into him.

No rice, no eggs, next to no fruit, not really many veggies.

On top of this he is now starting to reject this food as well or eat very little of it. I am chucking out so much rejected food at the moment.

I don't push him to eat because I don't want mealtimes becoming a battle and I trust him to regulate his own appetite. I will leave the food out for a while and sometimes he will come back to it and have a few bites (when it is stone cold or getting stale, yuck, but whatever, he's eating). He is very healthy and very rarely gets sick.

He's still pretty bad at eating with a spoon because he loves the fork (or his fingers).

But I do want to expand his repertoire to get him eating more like me and DH. I'm especially fed up with the fish fingers and chicken fingers and I don't like that they are processed.

Does the theory that you have to offer a food 10-15 times before they accept it actually work?

Should I just go hard and introduce something completely new and if he doesn't eat it, tough, don't offer anything else (using the theory that if he is really hungry he will eat it?) I've heard this one a few times and that for about 3 days it's tough but then they come to the party.

All suggestions gratefully received. :D

Isabelle is a small, tiny fussy eater and we have the problem that one day she will eat a WHOLE kiwi fruit or orange etc. the next day she will refuse it. I really think that if they are hungry they will eat, and my MCHN told me to do the tough love with food..not offering anything else. At first I found it really hard but then realised that if she was refusing one thing she was refusing most things anyway for whatever reason, so now we offer dinner, if she won't eat it, we offer her the fruit and yoghurt we offer every night after dinner and thats it. I really think if you do just offer what you are having for dinner and don't offer anything else except something basic like a piece of fruit he will eat eventually. They are clever little cookies and you can see them processing it like, well I don't feel like beef tonight but mum will give me toast in a sec if I hold out long enough! I would say it is worth a try hun. Must be so frustrating. Do you all eat together - if he sees you eating the same thing and he is offered the same he might eat too. I would definately keep offering a variety of fruit - choose something you feel like eating too so that if he won't eat it - you can eat it instead and not let it go to waste!
Good luck with it all
She does get a bottle before bed though so we know she isn't starving overnight.

It is very normal at this age for children to reject foods that they once demolished. I have read (I will try and find the book) that they eat a huge range of foods to start with and then decrease to very basic, plain food at around 18 months. I think it is a phase and don't battle with him. I would just give him what he wants (food wise) and wait until he moves on from it- may be months away. You could make your own fish fingers and chicken nuggets and freeze them as long as the fish and chicken were both never frozen to begin with. At this age they are just not into exploring new foods and textures and tastes- they have done that and will come back to it.

A bloke at work told me that last night he made veggie filo pastries for his DS and they sound like a really good finger food.

So he boiled up some potato/sweet potato and some silverbeet then put them in some pastry sheets and shoved in the oven till the pastry looked cooked.

But you could use any veggies and I'm figuring that because most people think pastry is yummy that babies would too.

Thanks everyone! Deirdre, that sounds just like my DS, and it has given me some comfort, thank you.

Fionas I'm loving the filo pastry idea, there is so much I could do with that, cheesy veg combinations, put some chicken and fish in etc.

Tanstar I'm kind of doing the tough love thing at the moment, I don't offer alternatives but wait till next meal or snack time, but it really doesn't seem to worry him...he is existing on fresh air. If he is really hungry he helps himself to a dry Weetbix from the pantry! He is very tall though, he is above 97th percentile so I guess his growth had to slow down eventually, maybe he just doesn't need the calories right now.