a little rascal

As I think I've mentioned before, I spend a lot of time in my work with Km 13 Church's Compassion program simply feeding children who either can't or won't feed themselves. There's a 4-year old who fits into that category named Alexis. Alexis has been my special friend lately. He gets dropped off for the afternoon session of Compassion (that begins at lunchtime) by his cousin. Every day, his cousin leaves him kicking, screaming and crying. She basically has to throw him down and then run out the door before he can re-attach himself to her. He then spends the next 5 minutes or so just throwing a tantrum (this literally happens every single day I work there). So usually, as soon as his cousin drags him in the classroom, I cheerfully shout "Alexis! We're going to have so much fun eating together today." At which point he usually looks at me with sheer terror in his eyes and begins to wail even louder. After his cousin has left, some time has past and his tantrum has begun to subside, I can usually convince him to sit in his seat in front of his plate of food. Of course, he always says over and over again that he doesn't want to eat any of it. And then I always say "why not, it's really good today?" Then I fix him a bite and shove it towards his mouth, which is always clamped shut, occasionally with both of his hands covering it. Then he'll turn to one side, and I'll follow him with the food. Then he turns to the other side, but I don't give up. I start playfully pleading with him just to try one bite. Finally, after I keep insisting and shoving the food in his face, he eventually pulls back and opens his mouth really wide. From there, the feeding starts. Even though he still complains, he eventually does eat most of his food. Sometimes I have to cut the meat up in really, really tiny pieces and then hide it amongst clumps of rice for him to eat it. Not even this works sometimes, and he just spits it out. I'm not exactly sure why we go through this routine every single time, but we've been doing it ever since I got back to work after our New Year's vacations. At first it was a pain, but now I kind of enjoy it. I think Alexis does too. I keep wondering if eventually he'll "really" like me and not look at me with sheer terror in his eyes when he first comes in the room. But even if he doesn't, that's okay too.