Feed Me

Suddenly we think Freya has got it. No longer is this about play. Freya now eats and eats and takes a good long time over it too.

Tony cooked for the first time that we have been weaning Freya on Sunday and we had sausage pasta. We have given up just now with the pasta so Freya gets a slice of toast instead with the sauce, but this was the first time she didn’t seem to want to get out of her Bumbo. She carried on exploring and eating long past us finishing our dinners. It was especially amusing to see her examining the toast towards the end. It looked as if she was considering the quality and vintage – turning it over and over, having a little nibble, feeling it. It was great fun to watch.

I have been a little more adventurous with what I take out with me now. On Wednesday I took melon, chicken and rice cake. I think bringing breakfast into the equation has led to a decline in lunch so she just has a nibble now.

Breakfasts… Well, she has always enjoyed toast and bagels so that stays on the menu but we do get a bit fed up of the crumbs and sharing our breakfast so I bought some fruit and custard pots from Heinz I think they were. I do like the idea of her eating more fruit and since she finds it easier to spoon feed herself rather than pick up slimy fruit I thought we could give it a go even though it may count as goop. They are just fruit and milk, nothing extra, no added sugar or anything. We tried a little for breakfast Wednesday morning and she seemed to like it although we decanted half a pot and she had maybe half of that. However, that was the morning come the evening…

Tuesday evening was very unusual. I was planning cottage pie but in the end did jacket potato with a mince topping. Freya had scooped out potato mixed with the mince and baked bean mix. Since we hadn’t had too much luck with mince so far I didn’t expect her to eat much. We loaded the spoon and wondered what would happen and whether I would be going back to the toaster for our reliable back up. No need. She loved it. Spoon after spoon went in. She still hasn’t grasped the idea of filling the spoon herself but after it’s loaded and handed to her it goes straight in. She ate more that night than I had ever seen her eat.

Wednesday the same thing happened (even though i can’t remember what it was we had). This time she still seemed hungry after having nommed on everything we had given her. I ran to the fridge and cut some melon, but she’s actually not too fussed about melon. Then I remembered the half a pot of fruit custard. She finished it completely. Admittedly there was quite a lot on the bib afterwards but again I was amazed at the quantity that she managed. She was still looking round for more food after so back to the kitchen again for some rice cake. After a brief feed on the rice cake she was finally done and went for a much needed bath.

Last night we had the evil burger and chips. I had bought some veggie burgers as I thought they might be lower in salt as the veggie sausages were. How wrong can you be? The veggie burger had twice the amount of salt that the beef burger had! I cut just a sliver of each off for Freya and gave her some chips which have practically no salt at all unless you cover them in it yourself. Ugh! She loved it all although we didn’t share our burger bun this time. She was again hungry after so I got a whole pot of fruit custard for her and some melon. She had a quick suck on the melon before going back to the discarded chips, but the fruit pot… She ate the whole thing and I suspect could have managed another one if we’d let her.

Damn you Heinz! Making it so easy for me to give my child fruit in the form of mush. Still, since she feeds herself I think it can still count…

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

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>