Harper had her four month check-up last week and is continuing the trend of being an over-achiever. Well, in the height department at least. She’s in the 90th percentile for height (thank you, Mommy) and 50th percentile in weight (thank you, Daddy). She’s basically a little baby supermodel. She just can’t help it.
At the appointment, our doctor gave us the okay to start giving her cereal. I wasn’t expecting this; I thought it was around six months with Elliott, but because I’d already starting stockpiling cereal and the amazing dissolving baby puffs, I was prepared for this assignment. Go me.
Nice and clean baby:
And then after the tornado, also known as cereal, came through:
It doesn’t look that bad, but that’s because you can’t see her hands or arms. It was like we didn’t even use a spoon and just let her shovel it in all by herself. Which, in hindsight, might have been less messy than the spoon.
She loved it in the beginning (we took video also, and when I figure out how to upload it, I’ll share–it’s pretty entertaining if I do say so myself…), but by the end, she decided the bottle was much easier and started shooting dirty looks at the spoon.
Dirty-look-shooting:
So now that she’s practicing the whole eating thing, I’m starting to gear up for baby-food-making. With Elliott, I made about 90% of the food she ate as a baby. I liked knowing exactly what I was putting into my precious little baby, where it was coming from, and that she was eating a variety of things.
It was pretty simple once I figured out the process and got into a routine. And I attribute Elliott’s love of all foods with the variety she ate as a baby. She’s a two-and-a-half year old that will eat almost anything we give her (although she does have a fondness for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that I wish we could have avoided).
And so I’ve been looking over the one-and-only baby food book I bought. This book taught me everything I needed to know about the process and had a ton of good recipes in it. And once you learn the basics, you can make baby food out of just about anything. By the end of making food for Ellie, I was just food-processing whatever we were having for dinner and she would eat it with us.
Annabel Karmel is British and so some of the recipes are not what we would typically eat, but there were so many food combinations and good suggestions that I didn’t mind the random gross-sounding one (tender casserole of lamb? no thanks.).
And she encourages the use of seasoning and spices in your baby food which I liked. Don’t dumb down the food just because you’re feeding a baby. I think that’s what sets parents up for picky eaters.
As a send-off, one more cute pic of Harper “The Don” Graham eating cereal for the first time…
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