Guest post by Casey of Life with Roozle

I was a picky eater as a kid. I didn’t like meat or cooked vegetables or anything spicy. I liked food that didn’t have a lot of flavor. My mom had three kids to feed and two were my very hungry older brothers, so my pickiness wasn’t really tended to. My pickiness also didn’t end with toddlerhood. I went from being a picky toddler to a picky preschooler and on and on until just after college. Though meals were a source of frustration for me for most of my childhood, I’ve always loved cooking and preparing food for my family.

As soon as my daughter was old enough for solid foods, I took on her meals as a creative challenge. The challenge being the balance between feeding her what she likes and making healthy choices.The answer to that challenge is the breakfast board.

Breakfast boards are a great way to introduce a variety of foods in a fun way. Our daughter loves the excitement of a new design and new foods every day. Trying new tastes is less overwhelming with only a few bites of each food available. When she finishes a board, she asks for either a new board or more of one specific item. We find that starting with a board makes her more likely to request more of the fruit or vegetables than just the preschooler standard bread and cheese food groups.

We use two small bamboo cutting boards as the breakfast boards. We do the cutting on a different cutting board to keep them free from scratches. Making the breakfast board at the same time as making lunches cuts down on the prep and having a small one help makes it a lot of fun. Breakfast boards are a great way to encourage variety and introduce new foods to picky toddlers as well as a much more exciting way to serve breakfast.

My wife and I post Roozle’s breakfast boards to Instagram almost daily with the hashtag #breakfastboard.

Casey is a lesbian parent blogger in Boston. While finishing her Creative Writing degree, Casey started blogging in 1999 and hasn’t stopped. She writes daily at Life With Roozle, a blog about her adventures with her wife and daughter in the city. Casey can be found on Twitter at @lifewithRoozle.