snow white

We started J on solid food right before she turned 6 months and it's been an interesting ride so far. My initial plan (like these ever work!) was not to make her baby food myself. This decision was mostly a time issue - I hardly have time to shower and curl my eyelashes, much less deal with pureed goo all over the kitchen I try so hard to keep clean. I also like the idea of feeding J what we're eating as soon as possible. Making two completely separate meals doesn't sound like fun and I don't desire to feed J in a specialized manner, i.e. completely organic or something like that. One healthy meal for the entire family sounds good to me. Obviously, we're not there yet as she's only tasted a handful of foods, but that's the goal - pending any allergy reasons ... but I'll get back to that in a minute.

So, we started with the basic jarred food and rice cereal and J seemed to be telling me one thing - it wasn't just the apple Snow White ate that was poisonous. In fact, all fruits are poisonous and shouldn't be ingested. Unless of course you have a handsome prince on hand, which our sweet Juliet does not ... unless daddy's count :) The disdain for fruit was a surprise to me. All the books say babies will LOVE fruit. The only fruit she will kind of eat is bananas, but apples, peaches, and pears are not good.

Rice cereal plus the green beans, peas, carrots, sweet potatoes, and squash were ok for about a month, but she was never really eating a lot, i.e. maybe a fourth of a jar once a day. I was getting frustrated because she had no emotion about eating - she didn't like or dislike it, she'd just sit there and look around the room while I shoveled the food into her mouth. Then, it's like she woke up one day and decided she didn't want any solid foods anymore. Ummmmmm ... what?

After a long heart to hear talk with her about the fact that she can't breastfeed forever and that she has to continue to give solid foods a chance even if she doesn't like them right now, she decided to keep an open mind about the whole thing ...

OR, I figured out that her issue was that she wanted to feed herself! I gave her some of my rice I was eating for lunch one day and she actually got excited about it. Hooray!! I seem to have a Miss Independent on my hands :)

Her success rate for actually getting anything into her mouth is probably 50%, but she's getting better and Charlie doesn't mind when she misses her mouth and it falls to the floor! So, due to the new development, I've been cooking a bit. I baked a sweet potato and cut it into chunks. She wasn't a big fan of this last night, but we'll try again. I steamed some green beans this morning and she liked those. The sweet potato flavored Gerber puffs were a hit too. I bought an acorn squash, carrots, and an avocado to try as well ...

Other tidbits:
-- The baby oatmeal cereal broke her little hiney out in the worst rash ever. So, we put oatmeal on hold until mid-Feb.
-- I had been giving her some bread, and made some chicken with rice soup this past week and her bowels got all messed up. She didn't poop one day, only once the next, etc. and when she did there was some pink in the stool - sign of allergy. Soooo, I am backing off all the new stuff and trying to go back to the staple veggies for now to see if we can get her back on track.