Feed Me

Nothing remarkably new this time, but a little trick that we have discovered…

Freya loves her curry, especially the meat, but would not eat the vegetables with the same gusto.  Even her rice was being demolished faster than the ordinarily-loved courgette.  So, I showed Linda how to cheat; I stabbed a chunk of courgette with her fork and then handed it to her.  She grabbed the courgette, ate it as though it were the finest sweet-meat, and looked at me for more.

It is not even like it was the fork, not really.  She was grabbing the food and pulling it off the tines, leaving the fork itself in my hands ready to be re-loaded.  Perhaps the only reason she eats rice, following this logic, is that she gets to eat it from a spoon.

It seem that, as a parent, I think I have come to the rather Zen conclusion that the ‘why’ is not so important as the ‘whether’.  If she eats vegetables and rice, I don’t care what prticular part of the trick works…

There have been some changes in the weaning experience lately. The first one has been the poo as was mentioned. It may be a strange thing to focus on, but the poo really shows how much Freya has come on. Now everything is really digested. This is real poo. Before Freya was swallowing things almost as an accidental side affect of playing with food, but now she is chewing and eating and digesting and all this can be seen in the consistency and texture of her poo.

But it got me thinking. If a baby is fed mush, how do people know when their babies have reached this stage. I assume that mush fed baby’s poo is just, well, mush and just smells bad. Considering research has proved that babies younger than six months can’t actually process much of the stuff that they are fed it seems pointless to me to make it so you have to deal with smelly poos before you really must!

The other thing that it made me think, is just how fast Freya is growing up. She is seven and a half months already, but I still remember this little pink thing who didn’t even fit into the cloth nappies we bought for her.

The other big exciting change that I am so proud of is that Freya has discovered, that if she has something too small to hold on to, she can put the whole piece in her mouth and chew it. Wooh! It’s exciting, I promise it is. It’s not pincer grip excitement, but it has really changed Freya’s eating habits. She can now, if she wants, get at the bit of food in her hand, ie. the handle of the stick of food. She positions the food near her mouth, opens her fist and pushes it into her mouth. Sometimes she leaves her fingers in her mouth to stop it falling out. It now means that I can give Freya smaller chewable pieces rather than leave everything as massive chunks or sticks. We’re not at a stage where she can pick peas up yet, but that will be the next big thing.

She is also having water with the evening meal every time now. She loves it. Unfortunately she will now dive for anything remotely cup shaped and try to drink from it, regardless of contents. We bought a Diody cup which is supposed to make sipping from a cup easier. She tries to hold the handles, but hasn’t quite grasped the fact that, if she jerks the cup around, water goes everywhere.

Food that has gone down well recently includes a cheesey pasta bake with courgettes, sausage and sweetcorn. As it was a bake it was much easier for Freya to pick the pasta up and she ate more than I have seen her eat in a long time. It was during this meal that she started to open up her hand and leave the food in her mouth to chew. She does love courgettes. The pasta was served up cold as lunch the next day and was eaten with equal relish.

Another stir fry also went down well at first. I used tinned baby sweetcorn which were soft so Freya could bite pieces off and chew them. She really enjoyed it and had finished one and started on the yellow pepper when she suddenly burst into tears. We never did work out what was wrong. We took her upstairs and checked her nappy, gave her some water, gave her hugs, but couldn’t see the source of the problem. Eventually, after she calmed down, we put her back in the Bumbo and she carried on eating perfectly fine. Ah, the mysteries of babies…

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

For the second time in one day, Freya was fed what we were having. We gave her courgette, sweet potato and butter-nut squash. She gave us a mess of epic proportions. She did actually eat a lot of it, perhaps as much as half, but she found a use for the rest of it.

As you can see by the photo of her cross-eyed smiling, she had a lot of fun and then was in desperate need of a bath. There were other photos, but I think this is the one that explains it all; that orange goop was solid until she got her hands on it, but it was face-paint by the time she finished with it.

There is a reason why we put down newspaper…