Feed Me

Ladies and Gentlemen, let me introduce The Pincer Grip!

I couldn’t be more proud as Freya picked up peas with her finger and thumb and popped them in last night as part of the vegetable curry I made. Sadly, she has decided that she wants to use this technique to eat rice instead of the spoon. Dinner time seems much longer than normal…

She also had a chocolate chip fairy cake and a tiny bit of chocolate chip cookie. It doesn’t hurt to let them enjoy the same things as you once in a while. It would hardly be fair for us to sit there pigging out on naughties and not let her have a little taste. To be honest she wasn’t that impressed. She preferred her melon slice even if it was covered in curry sauce.

Lunch time saw the usual pita bread with cheese and ham and one with cheese, cumin and carrot. I tend to cut them into strips and give her the ones which look like they will stay together better. She was a very hungry little girl today and nommed on four big strips, demolishing two completely and having a good go at the other two. Of course this meant that mummy only had less than one and a half pita breads for lunch and has had to eat more cakes to make up for it…

I hoped to get some seasonal fruit for us all to eat, as in these times of soaring food prices, I suspected that they may be cheaper. When I looked at what was in season there seemed an awful lot of vegetables and not a lot of fruit. There are apples obviously but I’m still not sure about giving Freya apples yet. Plums and blackberries appeared to be in season but these are two fruits I haven’t really tried except in jams or sauces so thanks to Freya I now have. Freya loves them both. Really the blackberries were for Tony as I thought Freya would have trouble with them, but she actually loves them. The mess, well, you can imagine! Bananas are still going down well although I did buy the lunch box sized ones. They looked much riper and nicer.

We tried cucumber which didn’t go down very well and we also tried one of Aitch’s recipes from the babyledweaning website of pita bread with melted cheese and carrot. It’s a good way to get babies to eat vegetables apparently and Freya really thought they were yummy.

Of course the most exciting news of the week has nothing to do with baby led weaning. Freya said ‘Daddy! Yeah!’ on Monday. It was in response to Tony saying ‘Who’s a silly sausage?’ so it’s even more amusing. She hasn’t said it quite so clearly since, preferring the classic ‘dadadada’. She is also pushing herself to her feet while in the bath. When she managed it she was so happy. It was great! She is also moving around the floor very fast now. It’s not a crawl as such, but it’s very effective.

One problem that we have noticed with baby led weaning (if you can call it a problem) is that whatever we eat and whatever we drink Freya wants some too. That’s fine with most things but it gets a little surreal when you’re trying to drink a nice cup of tea and this tiny hand appears up from your lap and pulls your mug down to her lips. She really is too adorable, but even we stop her sometimes!

I fed Freya a biscuit in public today! Woo! Actually she stole mine, but I kind of expected her to. She ate much more of it than I should probably allowed, but, hey, it’s only one biscuit. I’m not going to feel guilty and she enjoyed it so much. The mess was quite extraordinary and I even had to take her T-shirt off afterwards. She did have a vest on underneath though.

Dinner was a home made Chinese meal and I think this worked much better than the take away that we had over the weekend. It’s amazing to see her actually eating now. There was very little left of the piece of chicken she had a munch on. I used low salt soy sauce, sesame oil (since we’ve already established that she doesn’t have a problem), Chinese five spice, little chili powder, cumin, lemon juice and the veg I used were carrots, onions, bean sprouts and green peppers. She wasn’t that excited by the green pepper, but I’m not sure I expected her to be as I think they are an acquired taste. She really enjoyed the carrot, but I don’t think I made them big enough. I tried the noodle trick again. Making little nests and dumping it in front of her. She got her fingers straight in and started playing with them. She spread them all out as if she was trying to untangle them. So much for me making them into neat little nests! She didn’t even try to eat them this time though and although we put some rice on the spoon she wasn’t particularly interested in that today either. Nope, it was the chicken all the way.

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.

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

Last night’s meal for us adults was sausages, mash and carrots and so that was what Freya had. I wondered about trying her with a spoon as she always seems upset that we get cutlery and she doesn’t, so mashed potato seemed like the ideal starting point. To our amazement it worked. She worked out straight away what the spoon was for although she did keep trying to eat the end that we hadn’t loaded with mashed potato. She couldn’t of course actually get food onto the spoon but if we loaded it for her she could eventually get it into her mouth. She had a little sausage and a little suck on a carrot but the mash was what she loved best. Surprisingly it wasn’t as messy as I thought it would be. She did have an amusing potato moustache at one point but we didn’t get it on camera, sorry.

Yesterday we also had a pooey nappy of the most impressive kind. If ever you doubt about whether your child has eaten anything, just wait for the nappies. Although Tony has already reported on nappies, this one was the worst so far. Yes, the one before smelt, but this one had a completely new consistancy. A lot like mashed sweet potato actually… Why is it that I’m proud about this..?

Tonight, we tried sweet and sour pork with noodles.  That was what we were having, so that was what Freya was having.  It was fairly simple, made with a packet of sauce (it is easier and easier is better when you have a baby), carrots and peppers.  She took to it quite well, which surprised us both.

She started on the pork very quickly, chewing and sucking on it quite happily.  She liked running her fingers through the noodles, but more ended up in her lap than her mouth.  Peppers are a fairly safe bet, since the first solid food I ever gave her was a chunk of pepper  (she was teething and it was cold from the fridge), and she gummed on that quite happily too.  Even the carrot was greeted with a certain amount of enthusiasm.

Perhaps most surprising was her interest in drinking from a cup.  She keeps fighting me if I drink tea with her in my lap, trying (and managing, once or twice) to sip from my mug.  (Mmm…  Refined sugar, caffeine, tannin… everything a growing baby needs!)  So, after dinner, we gave her a little plastic cup of water.  She held it, tipped it up and drank from it.  She spilt less than she swallowed and even seemed to be working out how not to soak her clothes, not bad for an open cup without any spouts or anti-spill mechanisms…