Sunday, August 9, 2009

The Many Faces of Babyfood

We have successfully been feeding Lorelai baby food for about 3 weeks now. What a journey it has been! It all started when we seemed to be having trouble getting her to drink her formula. She just did not see interested in it AT ALL anymore. She was eating every 4 hours, but we were lucky to get 4 oz in her every time she ate. And sometimes even THAT was a struggle. I finally broke down and called her pediatrician. I talked with the nurse and she said to go ahead and start her on cereal and baby food twice a day. She said to start with vegetables and to only do one vegetable a day for at least 3 days to make sure that she wasn't allergic to them. I knew this already from reading up on starting babies on baby food. Matt and I had talked about it and we decided that we would start with the green vegetables and move to oranges and then yellows. Our reasoning was that the lighter the color, the sweeter the food. I have read things that say to start with the yellows and move to the greens, but I just didn't agree with them. Who would ever eat a pea if they had already had a sweet potato? Certainly not me.

Here is a picture of LL from the beginning of July when she tried cereal for the first time (at Aunt Laura and Uncle Gino's house).


We decided that we would start with green beans first. Green beans was something that I CRAVED when I was pregnant. I literally could have eaten green beans for breakfast (even though I never did). I thought that maybe since I had eaten is so much when she was in the womb, maybe the taste would be familiar to her.


She didn't exactly love them, but she didn't hate them, either. We also had to remember, she had never had ANYTHING with any flavor AT ALL, so it was all a little weird to her. And I think it would have been no matter what we had given her.

Before:


After:

The more we started feeding her solid food, the more we realized that we had a problem. We had bought a tray for her Bumbo and had planned to use that as her highchair for a while. Well, after feeding her solids for about 3 days, we realized that it just wasn't going to work. We have a very visual baby who wants to see EVERYTHING and is very distracted by what is going on around her. It didn't matter what we did, if she was eating in her Bumbo, she wanted to look all around and focus on anything other than eating! She has a "big girl" highchair at Matt's Mom's house and the couple of times that we had fed her cereal there, she did fantastic. In fact, she gobbled it down. I really believed that part of the reason that she ate so much better there was because her highchair prevented her from seeing so much of what was going on around her. This is when we decided to go buy a highchair of our own - our Bumbo just wasn't going to work anymore!

After looking around and thinking about it, we decided to get a highchair that fits right on top of one of our current dining room chairs. We don't have a lot of room in our dining room, so this really just made a lot more sense. Plus, it puts her at table level, not crazy up high.

Here she is trying out her new "big girl" highchair for the first time!
Another advantage of this style chair is that we can take it places with us. When we travel to see Meatball after he is born, it will be no problem to take this with us. I guess we also could take it to restaurants around town with us if we wanted to, also. I also liked this particular brand that we got because the seat is a vinyl type covering so that we can just wash it off with a wipe instead of worrying about her getting food all over a cloth seat. Another bonus - it will turn into a booster seat when she is a toddler!
Ready to eat her first meal!


After green beans, we moved on to peas. She actually liked the peas better! I think it was a combination of three things: 1- she was getting more used to the idea of eating solid food. 2- They are thicker than green beans. She doesn't even like her cereal watery. 3- They are actually a little sweeter!






After peas we moved on to carrots. She absolutely LOVED carrots! Not as much as she would eventually like sweet potatoes, but she did scarf them down quite often! Doesn't she look adorable?



This is what her daddy calls "Mush Mouth" :)





We've since had sweet potatoes (which she LOVED) and squash (which she didn't really care for). We started bananas this morning and she seems to like them. It always takes a day or two to really see what she thinks about a certain food.
Along with solids comes a lot of responsibility: manners! We are having to teach her three really big things right now: 1- HANDS DOWN! She always wants to chew on her fingers while she eats. 2- Mommy and Daddy hold the spoon, not Lorelai. 3- Not to blow raspberries while eating. That really makes for a huge mess.
I am SO HAPPY to be on solids now. I've been looking forward to this since she was born!

1 comment:

Emily said...

I am totally stealing your idea of the pictures with each new food!!! Also I agree completely on the manners...we went back to rice cereal this morning! My gut told me to start with green beans too but EVERYONE says start with oranges! Good for you for following your gut and not the "norm" I may copy that too haha