looking for some advice:

dcg 3yrs will ONLY drink apple juice or strawberry milk. i give the kids white milk for meals and juice for snacks...anything in between is water

but this child will NOT drink anything but what i said above..i have talked with mom and her remedy was bringing me a-juice and strawberry nesquick...NOT what i was expecting. i told her that i do NOT give anything but white milk and the juice is a variety. they LOVE the fruitables
sometimes i dont have a-juice so i feel bad she is thirsty.

(please no lectures on not giving juices, blah blah..we DO drink it )

should i just make sure to always have a-juice -- which can be hard to do sometimes

or just give her what she wants and move on? and make sure mom provides those things for dcg?

the old saying that a child will drink when thirsty is not always true. she won't ...period!
and i dont want her getting dehydrated , have problems and it be MY fault.

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i wouldn't do it. it's not fair to the other kids. i would offer her water like everyone else and if she didn't take it then OH WELL!

there's no way she could get dehydrated in the short time she's with you. a 9-10 hour day might not seem so short! but for getting dehydrated - it's not long enough.

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I agree to not give in to her. If she is thirsty, she WILL drink. Let mom know that due to licensing regs (if you want to go that route) you can't give strawberry milk and have to offer more than just one kind of juice.

Or, you could try starting with the milk and juice, and gradually add less powder and start watering the juice down more and more, or start mixing the apple juice with other kids of juice very gradually.

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My own daughter is like this. She is 4 and does NOT like milk. She will drink it if it is strawberry, so I mix a little strawberry in it. Personally, I would do that for the dcg, but have the mom provide the strawberry syrup. For the juice situation, if the mom was willing to provide the apple juice, I would do that too. I would offer her strawberry milk when I was serving the other kids milk and apple juice when serving the other kids juice. Between meals and snacks I would offer only water to her.
I would not let a 3 year old go all day without drinking, shes got to be thirsty, I wouldn't let my own child go all day without drinking so I would not let dcg girl either.

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How long have you had dcg? My kids and daycare kids used to get mostly milk and juice until I decided about 6 months ago that we were going to transition to milk with breakfast, water the rest of the day; and occasionally (like once a week) a juice for snack as a treat. It took a while, maybe a month, for them to come to drink water BUT it did happen! I did NOT give in to them, and some days they barely drank anything. But now they do really well. It takes time to change habits like that.

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We do just water and milk too. I have sugar free strawberry syrup and sugar free chocolate though so if I do let the kids have strawberry or chocolate milk as a treat I don't feel as guilty.

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I offer juice here too (they love cranberry strawberry juice or v8splash) I only offer white milk. I don't understand why people need to flavor things, whats wrong with plain white milk. I can understand if you give it as a treat but not everyday. I wouldn't give in and I wouldn't say anything to the mother. I have kids here who barely drink anything, and I mean anything and they are not dehydrated (my son is the same way--he was home sick yesterday and I realized he doesn't drink much either) I would leave water in a cup for her so she knows that if she's thirsty she has something to drink.

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I wouldn't give something different than the other children are drinking unless you have a note from the physician. If my dck's saw one having something different, they would all want it. Just my opinion :-)

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i agree. i wouldn't be happy to know that my child who was well behaved and does as she's told was getting water and white milk while another child was getting strawberry milk and juice as a reward for being a princess to put it nicely.

what kind of message does that send to the other kids? if you don't get what you want, just whine or be stubborn - and then you'll get your way. nothing used to drive me more crazy at school than when a teacher would tell a child they weren't getting a treat or sticker or whatever bc they misbehaved all day (which of course all the other kids witnessed) and then at the end of the day, feel bad for them because they straighten up and get quiet while the treats are being handed out. that sends a message to the other kids that you don't REALLY have to do what you're told and exceptions will be made for you if you don't. JMO.

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i'm gonna try just giving her what everyone else has . its been miserable so far she has done nothing but whine everytime i get up and come in to the kitchen. she WONT drink water

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I serve juice too! *gasp* :-)

My kids get juice with morning snack.
Milk (only white) with lunch
Water with afternoon snack.

No exceptions on what kind of juice etc. I would stick to your guns about this.

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I wouldnt cave to her, She would get milk for meals and water in between, personally we dont do juice but thats my own issue. lol. I do choco milk on birthdays,.. if she does get enough,.. she will drink anything,.. she just isnt thirsty enough yet. She isnt going to get dehydrated by missing 10 hours of strawberry milk or apple juice. she will get thirsty,.. and then Mom will rush to her aid and give in,.. and tomorrow you will begin again. Unless you can get mom to be onboard,.. but good luck there. I offer, serve, and move on. If she says she is thirsty, she gets white milk, reserved from whenever earlier that day or water. Never juice. never flavored milk.

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Oh this old saying is absolutely true - she just isn't thirsty enough yet. I have made the choice to serve milk and water only at my daycare. I have had kids who ONLY drank juice. It may take them a while but they eventually realize that they drink milk or water while here or they will just be thirsty. Some kids simply don't like the taste of plain milk and never will drink it and that's OK but they will eventually drink water if there are no other options.

It's fine if you offer your dcks juice. Since you do, she should only get it when you are serving it to everyone else too. Offer her water and milk in between and if she drinks it she drinks it if she doesn't she doesn't. I agree with QualiTcare in that it is highly unlikely that she will become dehydrated during the short time that she is at your house. Anyway, as soon as she leaves your house you can trust that she gets all the juice and strawberry milk she can stand!

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If she's truly thirsty, she'll drink what you offer...

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I had exactly the same problem with my newest DCG. The very first morning she was dropped off she had a cup of juice in her hand and I just asked her to take a drink and give her cup back to her uncle. He looked at me with a little confusion and I just explained that here I offer fruit instead of juice and served milk during meals with only the occasional cup of juice and that all of the kids drank the same thing. He was satisfied with that and hasn't brought her in with juice again.

As for the DCG, well she didn;t like it at all. She wouldn't drink the milk and so I would just serve her a small amount at first (so I wouldn't waste so much) which she would just leave it there and say she was thirsty and ask for juice. I would then just offer her water. She would whine or cry and I would send her to the "crying corner/step". It's the only place in my home where children are allowed to cry. They can cry all they want as long as it's there. Even when my 15mo DCB cries or whines and I ask "Uh oh, are you crying?" he walks himself to the step. As soon as he's done he gets up and plays lol. After a few days of this she stopped crying for juice. She still doesn't drink the milk usually but now she ASKS for water .

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I wouldn't give in either but I'd probably once or twice a week serve those drinks to all the kids. If she's thirsty enough she'll drink it.

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When my niece was little she would ONLY drink strawberry milk too, she stayed a week with me once and I didn't have any strawberry syrup so I used a drop of red food coloring and told her it was strawberry milk. She fell for it and I never did buy the strawberry syrup, just kept using the food coloring. She was 4 when this happened. Placebos work well sometimes.

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If she will not even drink water but likes strawberry milk, how about creating a fun activity? Use food coloring as a way to introduce the color. I would prepare water glasses with a few different colors and then leave one without color. Maybe create a "COLORS" week theme and do this for an after-nap and pre-snack activity so everyone's well rested. Let the girl know it's okay to try new things and talk about how neat all the colors are. How they smell (the same) and taste (the same).

Another day, freeze ice cubes in the different colors and put in just plain water cups and do the same type of activity. Maybe have a red and blue ice cube and one drink and talk about how the colors look together. This may create a fun activity for all the kids....ice cubes are fun in general until they get taken out of the glass, lol, BUT when someone tastes it and she see's all the "big kids" having fun drinking it, she will too.

Let me know if you go this route, I would like to see how it works. These can be science categories for color changes and solids/liquids or math activities for counting and grouping colors.

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i'm tired just reading that.

say NO and call it a day

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Juice is okay in moderation, I give orange juice every morning for breakfast.

Have you thought of mixing the milk with strawberry yogurt? It works for one of my kids--all sorts of yummy flavors to try, actually--he would not drink milk but will drink half milk with half yogurt.

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I would say...you get what you get and you don't throw a fit!!
Milk and water only.

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If you phrase it "You get what you get and you don't get upset" then it rhymes, too. I use that one a lot.

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lol - depends on where you're from! i was like "git and upset don't rhyme"

but of course gEt usually sounds like GIT around here. so, git and fit would be the rhyming phrase.

when i used to give spelling tests, i always had to make a point to stress words like gEt and pEn because even an ink pen sounds like PIN.

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haha, that's an excellent point. Lots of people around here say git instead of get, but I have a pesky tendency to enunciate. I got made fun of once for pronouncing the name of "Huntington" bank as "Hunt-ing-ton" rather than "hunnington". Yeah, I think it's all the theatre training I had as a child/teenager.

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gonna be another long day i think....already started whining

she came IN with a cup of strawberry milk

told her once its gone she gets water only, she melted

gonna stand my ground but i know she wont drink the water no matter what...i really didnt think she would become dehydrated, it was just an example i guess...just dont want any problems becasue she refuses to drink all day basically

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:-( That really stinks. I wouldn't have told her that she only gets water after that and just waited until it was time to give her something else. Essentially you started a fight before there was need for it. JMO, not trying to be mean. We all do our own things.

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here i water everyones juice down. one day 6 yr dcb saw me watering down the baby's juice and says " boy i'm glad you dont do that to mine, i wouldnt drink it." too bad ive only been doing it to his too for the last two years

here its milk with breakfast and lunch, 1/2 juice with snack, and water in between.

and me personally, i wouldnt give in either.

here we say.."you get what you get and dont pitch a fit"

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I would have handed the cup of milk right back to her parent and said no cups here.

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