pandabump: food glorious food!

And the weaning continues. She's been attempting solids for over a week now and we've managed not to skip any meals. WOW it's time consuming! I really like cooking, and cooking for Rose appeals to my mothering instinct on a whole new level! I've always loved cooking for Dan, fattening him up you might say, and have instantly become addicted to doing the same for Rose. FEEDER. But I was not prepared for the tediousness of the clean-up operation 3 times a day. It's boring enough cleaning bottles, but the highchair, area around highchair, plates, baby cutlery, and Rose herself are all in need of a hose-down after every meal. I'm going to turn into one of these mental mums who obsess about cleaning. And I don't even care about cleaning. Stop talking about cleaning!

Back to food. She's doing SO well. And she's had so many delicious meals! She's taken to every flavour I've thrown at her, even some hummous I made with far too much garlic in. Her favourites so far are cucumber, avocado, rice cakes, hummous (and a fake hummous I made with butter beans) and melon. But she really does have a good go with everything. We've even given her millet porridge (babies aren't supposed to have oat porridge for some reason, gluten maybe) a few mornings and given her the spoon to feed herself (CUTE/MESSY). I'm so proud of her.

Things I've learnt so far...although we don't want to "give up" and spoonfeed Rose purees, there's no harm in mushing up food on rice cakes/pita/dipped sticks of food, because she'll swallow much more of this mushed up stuff and at the same time be learning to self feed. So we've given her mushed up avocado, aubergine (this worked really well), carrots, yoghurt, hummous and a homemade tomato sauce. I even made breadsticks, which worked well for smearing in avocado. She loves gnawing on sticks of cucumber and fruit, and we left the skins on stuff like apples and melon because I read that it'd help her to grip the food, but we started to worry about her choking on the skin (she's managing to break them apart in her mouth) so think we'll skin them from now on. A lot of the food isn't being swallowed, but much more than I'd expected is. Hurrah! Her poo has changed (sorry!). Well, pictures tell the story best (none of poo, don't worry, but lots of food smeared all over a baby's face)...