Feed Me

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…

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…

This blogging lark is falling behind a little. I think like most people our weekends are busy with both of us home.

Freya has been munching her way through pita, salad, peppers, hummus, noodles, carrots, vegetarian sausages, chips, pasta, spinach, courgettes, biscuit, bread and we confess we let her try a tiny slice of pizza, although we probably shouldn’t have. As we had visitors on Friday and Saturday she joined us for lunch both times. It was salad both times so it was easy enough to give her some bread, lettuce and peppers to make her feel like she was joining in. She did miss dinner again on Saturday night as she’d had an exciting day, but since she had eaten at lunch time I didn’t feel so bad. Also, as I have to remind myself, her main food is still milk and will be for sometime to come.

We tried the vegetarian sausage as an experiment. We are both meat eaters and Freya seems to be very keen on meat too. Given a choice she will spend ages on a piece of chicken. I looked at the salt content of most of the sausages online and realised that they had frightening amounts but the vegetarian ones had only a fraction of the amount. Since I do worry about my health as well as Freya’s we thought we’d try them. Ugh! I have had vegetarian sausages before and quite enjoyed them, but these were awful. Tesco’s own meat free. They smelt great, but really did taste like flavoured card board. I think we’ll go back to the meat ones. I know the amount she digests means it isn’t worth worrying about at this time. I think when she is starting to eat proper main meals, like a whole sausage with mash etc, we’ll re-evaluate then.

One of my main concerns that I can see looming in the distance is Freya falling asleep before Tony comes home for dinner. The whole reason for baby led weaning is so that I don’t have to prepare different meals for different people, but do I feed her early or do we wake her up? It’s a tricky one and I wonder how other people cope. Of course it may be that she will carry on falling asleep for the night at 9.30pm for a long time yet… except for the three nights in the last week. Hmm… I’ll have to see how this pans out, me thinks.

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.

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..?