Post Punk Kitchen Forum

I'm totally calling my usual "Let's see what crepe hasn't gone bad in the refridgerator and cobble together some sort of lunch for you" lunch situation "tapas" from now on.

Yes! Be kind to yourself!

Hee. We're have tapas lunchtime here too. Today, for instance = tofu cubes, the last of the pears, some avocado on its last legs, and some of the good bread. We generally have mostly things she likes at lunch, with one or two challenges. :) At dinner, we're trying to move more toward family meals. We have been catering to F so far, but I want her to eat real people food too. Now, this often means that she rejects some of the food and eats the one "sure thing" that's on the table, but yeah. We're nursing, so I don't feel too pressured for a super balanced diet yet. If she happens to have a day where she hasn't eaten a lot during the day, I may cater a bit more to her in the evening as well.

Hahaha I call it "leftovers tapas" as well. And we do lunches like this often too! Which reminds me that I should try out some of the Vegan Eats World baked tofu recipes to have some good finger foods around. V's been living off a lot of empty carbs while we were traveling and I need to get back to real food, but haven't gone shopping yet so it's not a great start.

Its so hit or miss, and we are probably doing it all wrong. Basically we start at breakfast and I offer her two options including: tofu or oatmeal or cereal or farina. And she picks one and then may or may not eat it. And then at lunch, I'll offer her two options again and she may or may not eat that (and yes, we also cobble together stuff from leftovers). And at dinner, I offer her dinner and she may or may not eat it.

If she doesn't like it she says its "Hot." Which it never actually is.

And if she is hungry she stands in front of the fridge, squeaks till we open it, and then points to things she is interested in looking at. But the only words she can say really clearly is apple and nana, so she is just randomly yelling "APPLE!" or "Nana!" at things. And so we let her taste stuff until she gets bored.

Its hilarious, and silly, and very ineffective.

Raygold says that sometimes it cracks me up! It too hot! It too 'picy! It gisgusting! It lkjlkno;iinihjslkentkn! (Made-up word.)

hahaha tofulish, you pretty much just summed up zaf's eating for the day. i'm not too worried if she doesn't eat at a particular meal because she is breastfed, so it's easy to be lighthearted about the whole randomness of her eating "habits".

also talking about blw, zaf gets really angry if she's not allowed to hold her food, which is the hardest part of feeding her for me, because i *hate* the process she goes through of squishing the food, painting it on her high chair, rubbing it in her hair and throwing bits of it on the floor. in my perfect world, i would feed the food to her and there would be no mess, but she just won't eat at all if i try to get my way :P so, food art it is.

:)
I think I had a very similar post when Will started "eating." Weirdly exciting!

Phineas is 5 months now and I'm thinking of starting him on baby led weaning. I went back through this whole thread and I'm feeling like it's probably the right choice, but if anyone has any specific thoughts about starting BLW before 6 months, I'd be appreciative.

I started Finny on spoon-fed purees and oatmeal a few weeks ago because he was super-interested in our food (grabbing for it, staring at us while we ate, etc.) He's tried a bunch of different fruits and veggies and has been pretty excited about everything. He likes to hold his own spoon and feed himself (or sometimes his cheek, eye, nose...) and he also seems to know when to chew. The oatmeal I give him is just regular oatmeal that I've pulsed up a bit in my food processor before making it and he gums that before swallowing. If I lightly mush an avocado or some peas, he'll gum those too. He seems to like homemade food over store-bought baby mush, but prefers both mush and homemade food over his bottle unless he's very hungry.

The point of all this is that I get the sense that Finny would prefer to feed himself over me feeding him and that he'd probably be able to figure out the chewing thing. That makes me think that it might be okay to start him on BLW before 6 months. The only thing that gives me pause is that I poked around on a bunch of BLW websites and a lot of them were very down on starting the weaning process before 6 months.

P.S. PPK babies are the cutest babies -- be they covered in curry or guac or otherwise.

I really really really think youjust have to trust your gut. If he seems ready, then you don't have to wait until 6 months exactly. Moving food to the back of their mouths is the most important skill for starting solids, supposedly. There's a good bit of literature suggesting that waiting til 6 months can reduce baby's risk of food allergies, but then more recently, there are some contradictory studies.

We waited till just before 6 months (just a few days), but I think if you go slow then it can be a wonderful experience for parent and baby. The first time we let Freya gum some food, I thought her eyes might pop out of her head. :)

We had our first non-messy restaurant meal ever! We had roast pork lo mein and none of it ended up on the floor!

That's great news, t'lish.

We ate out tonight, too. There was no mess, but she didn't eat anything! Too busy watching everything. We were near the kitchen and the place had a dumbwaiter...way too interesting for eating. Also, she's going through this phase of waving at EVERYone. Too busy to eat!

We commenced with the baby led weaning. I made pancakes and I think that some of them wound up in Finny's belly. (My best guess is that there was a 3:1 ratio of floor:tummy). Either way, he seemed really happy to be feeding himself.

Yay pancakes!

Yay! This is late, but I was going to say if you are comfortable starting before 6 months-- go for it. He's not going to be super efficient for a while (took Will until 8 or 9 months), so it's just more practice than anything.

Giles had his first dinner where more definitely ended up in his tummy then on the floor! We ended up with a very "green" theme on accident. He had green beans, cucumber slices, grapes, and hummus on toasts as well as a little of my sweet potato burrito. I can't believe I hadn't tried green beans out on him before this - he loves them!

Giles had his first dinner where more definitely ended up in his tummy then on the floor! We ended up with a very "green" theme on accident. He had green beans, cucumber slices, grapes, and hummus on toasts as well as a little of my sweet potato burrito. I can't believe I hadn't tried green beans out on him before this - he loves them!

Sierra finally has started to prefer whatever the rest of us are eating to anything I make just for her. She insisted on eating black beans and rice last night - I had to pick out the jalapenos for her bowl!
also, we've started always keeping roasted sweet potatoes on hand because ever since we started making them for Sierra, Dahlia is obsessed too...a few nights this week she's requested some after dinner like as dessert.

I think Giles ate his weight worth of kidney beans last night! I made the Mango Barbeque beans from AFR and tossed a few kidney beans on his tray and he gobbled them up and as long as I put more on his tray they were eaten with speed. He then even allowed me to spoon feed him some of the soup I was eating (arabian lentil stew from AFR).