Gametes In Love

After 5 months of eating off the mom G is ready for some variety in his diet. That’s right folks, solids are right around the corner and since I want to ease him into the experience we began “practicing”.

What does practicing for solids entail? Essentially me feeding plain breast milk to G out of a spoon and his little dish while he’s sitting in his high-chair. I wanted him to start associating his chair, the spoon and the colorful dishes we got him with food time, and I also wanted him to start food-time with something I guaranteed he’d eat. I really didn’t want to start the process with a food he might dislike and then associate our setup with something yucky coming.

It went well.

He got the hang of the spoon pretty quickly, although he needed to learn the hard way that a spoon won’t fit in the mouth if a hand is already in there (and vise-versa). He’s really into putting his fingers in his mouth right now, and couldn’t wait to follow each spoonful of milk with a little thumb chaser.

I had to learn (also the hard way) that feeding a baby is a little like racing a car through an obstacle course. You see, a colorful spoon is very interesting to a kid that likes to wave his arms about. You have to duck the spoon and get it back on track while arms are moving all about. Food flinging is not a sport I want to participate in right now (and to be honest, probably never).

Here are some pics of our eventful day:

Adorable, right? The little drool down his chin, just cracked me up. I was very impressed with how little spilled. We only did an ounce of milk and almost all of it went in his tummy.

We’ll keep at this milk-only routine for the next few weeks. President’s Day week-end will be our first experience with rice cerial. Ooooh! It will be so thin, it will flow like milk, but we’ll see how he takes to it.

I had hoped that we could wait to do solids as close to 6 months as possible, but the 3 day week-end feels like a convenient time to start and the kid is really starting to devour more than I can produce. I  send about 22oz of milk per day to day care with him and he’s apparently asking for more. Those 22oz require me to pump 6 times during the day, and wakeup at 2am on top of it, so I’m maxing out my capability here. We tried giving him formula to supplement anything over that and although it was acceptable to him on a few occasions in the past, he turns it down now. So… I’m trying not to rush to solids too much, but I’m starting to reach my limit of what I can provide to him personally.

Our plan of attack is that he’ll still do all of his meals at day care from a bottle. After school he’ll get his ‘momma-direct’ meal and then follow up with a solid. “New” solids we’ll introduce only week-end mornings. This way all his bowl & spoon eats will be with us until he starts having more than one meal a day be a solid one.

He’s growing up fast, huh?