Feed Me

Poor little Freya has a cold. I should say another cold. Apparently a baby will get 8 to 10 colds in their first year. So far this is number three so I think we have been fairly lucky. It does mean that Freya is having real difficulties with feeding from me. She’s all bunged up and snorting her way through her feeds, coming up for air every now and then. However, she seems to be eating solids with much gusto apart from Monday when she fell asleep just before dinner and we didn’t have the heat to wake her.

Sunday we had pesto, pasta, peas, bacon, onion and courgette. Freya had all but the bacon and the onion. I cut the courgette into nice big piece and this went down really well and we had much more success with the pasta. Twists work very well. She is actually gumming bits off now and eating them rather than just sucking the pesto off. I have noticed that dinner is taking longer every day as Freya gets more and more used to eating and being in her bumbo.

Freya’s dinner today was a piece of cold roast chicken and a few chips and a couple of carrots, but it was the chicken that occupied most of her attention. She seemed really hungry. There was an amusing disgusted face when trying th carrot, but I think it was just that she bit a little too much off. She was asleep early again, before Tony had got home, but this time we did wake her up for three very good reasons. She needed a bath, she needed changing and, most important of all, Daddy wanted a hug. After being woken she was remarkably congenial and quite happy to join us for dinner. I think she was just happy to have seen Tony.

Freya got her tooth through and then a canine, right? That’s odd, but I can live with it. Now I don’t know what is going on. The canine has gone again. How do teeth appear and then disappear? No-one told me about this. It’s now been missing for two days so I’ll assume it has changed its mind and doesn’t want to come through yet. Becoming a parent is full of mysteries.

As for food, we thought we’d go mad and let her have a tiny fairy cake all to herself. Oh, we know how to live dangerously in our house. It was holding together ok until she thrust it with both hands into her mouth and it exploded – over Tony, over the sofa, over the floor. As we’re really bright in this house we didn’t even have a bowl for it! It was amusing though and she played with the crumbs for a while, feeling the textures, clearly enjoying herself and that’s what it’s all about.

Dinner was cottage pie again. After the success of last time we tried this I couldn’t help but be a little disappointed that Freya fell asleep just before I served up. Ever the optimist, I put some aside for her and she did wake up just before it went completely cold. We tried the spoon again and I am still amazed at how quickly she has picked up which end goes where. She still doesn’t have the skills to load the spoon up herself, but once that’s done it goes straight in the mouth. She ate a fair amount of the meat and potato, but was happier just sucking on the spoon for the most part. I did have to turn the television off though as she would keep turning round in her bumbo to watch. I wouldn’t normally have it on at all, but I really like Strictly Come Dancing and so, it seems, does Freya.

See also:

Our daughter thinks she is a rabbit. As usual, she had a little of what we had. There was beefburger, there were chips, a bit of the bun. We threw in some sliced chicken for good measure, due to her love of meat. Then we added lettuce.

We did not expect her to eat the lettuce, since it was a fairly large leaf. I suppose we expected her to suck it for a while, soothing her sore gums, then drop it and move onto the real food. We were wrong. She chewed it a little, then a little more. Before we knew it, she had eaten most of the leaf. I cannot say how; we chew lettuce, but she has no teeth. I saw her tear it a little, but not enough to really consider bite-sized. I suppose she must have mashed it until it was soft enough to swallow.

After that, we expected her to eat the bread, but we were wrong again. She wanted meat. She ate the chicken (not ‘wafer thin’ chicken, 1/4″ thick sliced chicken-breast) and then the burger. After that, she had a bit of a nibble on the bread and chips, but she was after meat last night. We checked; there was only a little in the way of dropped food.

So… meat and lettuce seem to be the order of the day…

Ok, I have read up on teething. I know that the first teeth to arrive are the two lower front ones, right? So not the canines. They come later. Not in my baby… I didn’t think anything when the first one came through but now I realise that the one on her right is so far away that the teeth coming through are canines. If they’re not then they are secondary incisors, still not the ones that are supposed to come through first. <sigh> I guess Freya wanted to do it her own way.

Last night Freya enjoyed sweet potato, courgette and carrot. I think she ate more than she has managed before and so we were quite happy. I would have been happier if I’d managed to get the vegetables out of the oven earlier as they did turn to mush very quickly but Freya seemed to really enjoy it. There was a moment when she got a rather large piece of courgette skin stuck to her tongue and we were waiting for her to spit it out, but this time she surprised us by swallowing it.

This morning we let her have a chomp on our breakfast of bagel and Philadelphia. I scraped most of the Philly off as we were in bed and I’ve only just changed the sheets and we know what a mess Philly can make.

see also: Breakfast 2

I just want to make it clear that I am not against spoon feeding babies. I was really excited about it when Freya was 4 months and bought the baby rice and everything. Then I realised that my life from then on would involve pureeing and boiling and mashing and washing up the blender and I felt a bit differently. I am inherently lazy. If there is a quick way to do something, I will do it. If there’s a short cut, I’ll take it. If there’s a way to get out of the washing up, I’m there. But then I found baby led weaning and while it meant that I had to wait until Freya was 6 months I realised how much less effort it would be. Of course there are lots of other benefits listed but I leave that to other people. So when I talk about it with such passion to other people I’m not trying to preach, I’m honestly trying to save them work! I want to spread the word (actually that does sound preachy now!) that they don’t have to spend their life pureeing stuff as babies can manage it themselves. But I know it’s not for everyone and later in life no one will care how they started weaning.

I guess this is about the fact that Freya ate a biscuit in front of people to day and I really didn’t expect the reaction that it caused.

So let’s talk about salt  shall we? The guidelines are as follows:

• less than 1g (0.4g sodium) a day from 0-12 months,
• 2g (0.8g sodium) a day from 1-3 years,
• 3g (1.2g sodium) a day from 4-6 years,
• 5g (2g sodium) a day from 7-10 years, and
• 6g (2.4g sodium) a day from 11 years.

This is from the NHS website, but they all say the same. A gram of salt is actually a huge amount for a  baby and I don’t think it would be possible for me to get that much salt into her on purpose let alone by accidentally giving her too much.

Now lets examine the slice of bread she had last night. I took one slice of bread and cut in in half. One slice of bread has 0.5 grams of salt so that’s taken it to 0.25. Of that half slice I made four fingers and offered her two of them – 0.125. Of those fingers, she digested perhaps 1/10th of them and even that is an over estimate, but that takes it down to 0.0125 grams of salt. Now, she doesn’t even have bread every day and bread is supposed to be one of the worst offenders for salt. I don’t use salt for cooking and I do keep an eye on salt levels in food, but I have to say that quite often I have found higher salt levels in baby food and baby snacks compared to their adult equivilent.

So I rest my case.

At last. Following advice, yet again from www.babyledweaning.com, on pasta shapes, we tried the twists. I think perhaps with the easier to grip shape and Freya getting better at her grip she actually managed to pick up the pasta and have a munch. We did try stabbing the pasta with her baby fork but it fell off pretty quickly. As I knew she wouldn’t take much of the pasta we gave her some soldiers of bread with the pasta sauce which she really enjoyed. I have to say that the pasta sauce also comes from the babyledweaning site. Pesto, pasta, bacon and creme fraiche. Unsmoked bacon as otherwise it’s too salty, but it makes a really nice meal. I don’t know why I haven’t tried pesto before. Yummy!

Yes, we decided to go with Thai green curry and rice.

As has always been our way, we decided to give Freya whatever we were eating.  In this case, a green Thai chicken curry.  We tried giving it her with a rice-cake, as we were not sure how she would take to normal basmati rice, but then decided to load some sauce-laden rice onto her spoon and see what she did.

We started by giving her the chicken, just to see what would happen.  We tend to eat it fairly spicy, but we have learnt not to assume anything with our daughter.  Instead of spitting it out or crying, she chewed quite thoroughly and happily on the chicken.  I think this may even be the first time she has had chicken, since we worried about the way chicken can fray and crumble.  We needn’t have worried, since both spice and fraying were received with little more than a naughty smile, the one she usually saves for when she has managed to stick her hands (or face) in someone else’s dinner.

The rice came next, on her baby-sized spoon.  We put it to her mouth, since rice is prone to spilling, and she took some.  I think it tends to be slick enough to slide down your throat, so she did not gag or spit.  She was not very excited by it, I don’t think.  She was content to be fed rice, but not to actively feed herself rice; if we wanted her to eat, the chicken was the answer.

We decided to finish with rice-cake, which she licked the sauce from, but was too tired and thirsty to eat it.  She lolled over the edge of her bumbo instead and waited to be lifted free.  She was drooling quite a bit, perhaps due to the spice, and making little or no effort to stand when I held her up.  I ended up holding her while I brushed down her clothes, then watching her sit down heavily right on the pile of dislodged food.

Like most days, this finished with milk and a bath, then more milk and straight to bed.

After a hard day’s shopping at the NCT nearly new sale on Saturday I was really in the mood for spending time in the kitchen. Don’t ask me why, but I really wanted to prepare something. Although we had tried Freya with mashed potato I wondered how a cottage pie would go down. Our cottage pie (which was really yummy incidentally) had mince beef, onion, tinned carrots, red pepper, baked beans, cumin, sage, Worcester sauce and chives, with a little butter and milk in the mash. Freya had her spoon again and ate quite a bit of the mashed potato. I think the heat put her off the meat although she gave it her best shot.

Freya now really wants to join us in every meal. Whenever we have food she stares and stares and smiles slightly and stares until we relent and give her some of what we’re eating. Bagel and Philly went down quite well for breakfast this morning although knowing how much mess Phillidelphia makes, I did scrape off most of it before giving it to her. We were in bed after all!

Tonight’s dinner is pork, sweet potato, butter-nut sqaush and red pepper. I will update if something interesting happens as she’s had all this before. Just for reference I put sage over the pork and have that middle/top in the oven. The butter-nut squash is peeled and cubed and thrown in a sandwich bag that has a couple of teaspoons of olive oil in it. Toss it around and then put it on the baking tray. Top up the olive oil and repeat with any other veg (courgette, red peeper etc) but before doing it to the sweet potato cut into chips and add a teaspoon or so of paprika to the bag. I confess this is most definitely something I got from Aitch on the www.babyledweaning.com website, but it is truly scrummy and everyone should try it!

Oh, and by the way, Freya definitely does have a tooth! Hooray! It’s just at the bottom left whereas I thought I had seen one at the top right… My little baby is growing up. <sigh>

Well, no, not really. We had burger and chips on Friday night and so Freya had some carefully patted dry burger and some bun. She does like meat and, as long as the burger is quite firm and dry and you cut a slice off the edge, she can handle it quite well. She still seems fairly indifferent to chips. She has a suck if they’re there but otherwise will ignore them. Burger bun was very well received though. I did wonder about the sesame seeds as these can cause allergic reactions in some babies, but I figured since she’s been having hummus quite a lot and hasn’t had any reaction, she should be ok. One of the ingredients of shop-bought hummus is sesame seeds, something I didn’t notice for ages, even though I carefully avoided using sesame oil for stir fries. It just shows that you can never guess what might be in things. Always read the label.

The problem comes when we have pasta for dinner. Since it is cheap, this happens a lot. Freya can’t deal with pasta just yet although I have found advice on what shapes are easier on www.babyledweaning.com so next time I’m buying pasta I’ll be getting conchiglie or farfalle. Apparently these are easier for little hands to grasp. We had sausage pasta (left overs from yesterday) with red peppers and red pesto. I didn’t even know you could get red pesto and I have to say I wasn’t impressed. I will be sticking to the green in future.

Freya found the piece of red pepper the most easy thing to deal with as the other components were just a little too small. We did try sticking her baby fork into a piece of sausage and then some pasta, but this only really worked for one or two sucks before falling off. At the end she happily sucked on just a rice cake for a while. When all else fails the rice cakes are champion… even though they smell foul.

We signed up for Jo Jingles today. Maybe handling bells and shakers will help with her spoon skills. Time will tell.