Baby Food

We started Alexandra on solids around 5.5 months. At first it was nothing more than an exercise in body painting. She would literally purse her mouth shut and grab at the spoon full of rice cereal and smear it all over her body. Cute, but nerve wracking! I made multiple attempts to feed her oatmeal or rice cereal. I was always unsuccessful. My husband found a bit more success so he became the feeder. Alexandra became comfortable eating cereal after about 3 weeks of trying it. However, she rejected any new flavours I would introduce. Hated bananas (what baby hates bananas!), hated pear sauce, hated sweet potato. I was starting to get devastated that I wouldn't get to put my Baby Bullet to good use! Then i started to realize that what Alexandra seemed to hate the most was eating off the spoon. I started giving her chunks of watermelon or apricots and she seemed to do a bit better sucking/gnawing on those than eating them in pureed form. I just wasn't really all that comfortable with giving her "chunks" of food. I contemplated maybe just doing baby-led weaning but I was a bit nervous about it. Then I saw some other bloggers talking about Baby Gourmet organic baby food pouches. I bought a couple and Alexandra would suck the food right out of the pouch. Suddenly, without the spoon in the way, my baby girl was loving these new flavours! I was so happy, but very disappointed that maybe I wouldn't get to make all of my daughters food because I would have to resort to buying these "pouches" in order to get her to eat! Then I was struck by some mommy-genius (ok...not really but I am proud of my "invention"!) I put some pureed sweet potato in a ziploc bag, snipped off on corner and squeezed the food into baby A's mouth. She loved it just as much as the Baby Gourmet! I have now found a wonderful (non-messy! very portable!) way to feed my baby without the spoon that she for some strange reason hates! So far some homemade combo favorites include:

Mango Chicken
Banana, blueberry, avocado
Squash and green bean
Chicken and pear
Chicken, blueberry, apple

And let me tell you...my child loves to eat! At 7 months she finally "gets it!" and she loves it! And I love it...because ever since she really started eating she is SLEEPING much better! And we all know that is what really counts! She is sleeping pretty regularily from 7:30 or 8pm until 4 am, up for a quick 5 min feed and down again until 8 am. Of course there are still some terrible days but she has officially weaned herself down from 2 night feeds to one. I'm sure I could pop the soother in her mouth at 4 am and she would go a few more hours without a feed, but right now (since I don't have to get up for work) I would rather feed her at 4am, and then get another good stretch out of her until 8 than not feeding her and have her wake up for the day at 6:30 or 7.

I hope you are all having a wonderful weekend! We are going to a friend's pool tomorrow and I can't wait to get A into the pool in her new floatation device (its like an inner tube that she sits in)!

:)LTB