Feeding the babe.

Oh what a fun adventure this has been.  Little Lyla Lou LOVES to eat!  I thought I would write a little about the joys of feeding this babe of ours.

Before we started this process I had a lot of worries about what to do.

When should I start?

Do I have to start with rice cereal?

What about rice cereal or oatmeal?

How many meals a day?

How much do I feed her?

Do I feed fruits first or veggies first?

If I start with veggies, how long do I wait to introduce fruit?

Should I make my own baby food?

What in the world is baby lead weaning?

 This is definitely an area that parents just have to go with their gut (and talk to their pediatrician) and decide what works best for them and their baby and then just go with it.  

 As I said before,  we decided on Lyla's 5 month birthday to feed her rice cereal.  My mom was in town and I wanted her to share in witnessing one of Lyla's milestones.  So after Lyla's dinner time nursing we mixed about a teaspoon of rice cereal with a lot of breastmilk and made it pretty runny.  It was hard to read her reaction to the meal based on her millions of faces.  I honestly don't even know how much of it actually stayed in her mouth.

Over the next couple of days we slowly increased the thickness of the rice cereal and watched her get use to the whole concept.  I didn't want to push this milestone on her if she wasn't ready but within three days she started to really love it and we saw a whole lot of faces like this:

She ate rice cereal for dinner for about two weeks then I added a lunch time serving of cereal too (this always came after she nursed).  Right around that time we gave her her first "real" food for dinner.  We decided to start with veggies.

Yummy sweet potatoes!

At this point, girl was hooked and we could NOT get the spoon to her mouth fast enough!

There wasn't a food she tried that she didn't love.  We followed everyone's advice of waiting 3-4 days before introducing a new food and waited until she had a variety of veggies before giving her fruit.  By the time she was 6 months old she was eating 3 meals a day (again, always after nursing first) and had tried a big variety of foods:

rice cereal

 oatmeal

peas

green beans

carrots

squash

sweet potatoes

applesauce

bananas

pears

prunes

avocado

Feeding Lyla was an entertaining experience for sure.  We even started putting her in the highchair at restaurants and she LOVED sitting in the VIP seat!

First time in a restaurant high chair

Jesse and I make our own baby food and freeze it in ice cube trays.  It is SUCH an easy route to take and I would recommend it to anyone as it saves so much money.    Preparing her food is as simple as getting some cubes out (mixing up flavors!) and popping them in the microwave for a few seconds.  

Sometimes we put a cube of food in a mesh feeder and let Lyla go to town on it.  This is a perfect thing to do when I'm done feeding her and Jesse and I are busy eating our dinner.

And sometimes she falls asleep at the dinner table while sucking on it


We do have a stock on packaged baby food because it's much easier to take it to restaurants and other people's houses.  One thing I LOVE is using the squeeze packets of food and buying the spoon attachment   Talk about some easy feeding!  

Yummy yummy in my tummy

If your like us though and ever decide last minute to stop for lunch and have nothing to feed your little one, you can always ask for a banana and smash it up right at the table.

Thankfully we had a clean spoon in the diaper bag


Now that Lyla is 7 months old she has tried a few more foods like:
pumpkin
cherries
blueberries
spinach


But there is nothing this kiddo loves more than to feed herself.  After watching her quickly master the art of eating mum mums (little rice cakes that dissolve instantly in their mouths)

We started giving her more finger foods to explore.  I have a few friends that are doing baby-lead weaning and I've been getting advice of what foods work for their kids.  

So far Lyla's tried:

bananas

avacados

toast fingers

broccoli 

mac and cheese

I will say that bananas and avacados are too slippery for her fingers for now.  But honestly this time is more for her to explore the foods then it is to really eat them

 (which most ends up in her lap or on the floor anyways- thank goodness for Ernie the doggie vaccum!)

So there you have it.  
Our little adventure of our little eater. 

I would love to hear some of your stories of your feeding adventures.
What foods are your littles ones favorites?