Eating Peas + Encouraging Right Handedness

eating peas and encouraging right handedness

Emma Vance had her first taste of peas today, and, well, let’s just say that she wasn’t too impressed. :)

We’ve been doing the oatmeal thing for a couple weeks now, and it’s going great. We were waiting for Ryan to get back into town before starting vegetables, and her reaction was so hilarious that it was worth the wait for him to be able to participate. Let’s hope that she likes other veggies better than she liked peas or we may be in trouble…

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it before, but ever since she was born, E.V.’s had a strong inclination toward using her left hand. We noticed it right away, but since she was a newborn, we simply took note of the habit and filed it away for future consideration. Well, now that she’s older and grabbing objects, she still seems to have a bit of tendency toward her left hand, especially since we began spoon feeding her solid food. It’s been a hot topic of conversation over here at the Shove household, and we resolved that although we don’t care deeply about whether she’s left or right handed, it would make life easier if she was a righty. (Yes, I still love and adore all of my lefty friends out there.) This brought up the question: Can you make your child left or right handed?

I’m not sure what the real scientific answer is, although I suspect it’s a resounding “no.” However, we figured that we’d at least try to give her a fighting chance to be a righty or at least ambidextrous, so we decided to leave her alone when playing but won’t allow her to feed herself with her left hand. (Since she’s going to be able to help feed herself in the next few months, we decided to skip the “don’t grab the spoon” thing and just work toward being able to politely and skillfully hold it.) It started out rough, mostly because I’m right handed, meaning that grabbing the spoon from me with her left hand was easiest. It’s taken a lot of practice, but now I feed her with my left hand while holding her left hand down on the high chair tray. It took about three or four days for eating with her left hand down to become habit, but I’m happy to report that she’s now naturally feeding herself (term used loosely!) with her right hand. If she turns out to be a righty, one day she’ll thank me and appreciate the hassle I went to in order to set her up for an easier life. And, hey, in the process it seems that I may be gaining some ambidexterity myself–bonus!