Salt and pepper

So, rule number one: salt is out. No food with added salt for Indigo. So I have been concentrating hard not to accidentally / out of habit throw a bit of salt in my cooking. Of course I didn't spare a second thought to pepper... I cooked us some nice roasted potato wedges (which by the way are good for chewing and not too slippy) and put on some pepper. The wedges were well received at first but once the hotness of the pepper hit she got a bit upset. I realised straight away what I had done, lesson learnt. Indigo spent the rest of the meal sitting on my lap tucking into my salad instead and has had a few meals since, so thankfully it hasn't put her off her food.

Fruit with handles

We are now a few more days in to our weaning experience with Indigo and things are going quite well. We have offered a variety of different things, all of which has been well received. The challenge at the moment is trying to figure out what shapes to make the food so it's easier to hold for her. Fruit seems to be particularly slippy and difficult to handle; we have offered her banana, mango and melon and each fruit seems easier to hold when we leave some skin on the end to create a handle. Though once the fruit has been dropped a few times and her hands are all wet and sticky it really doesn't make much difference anymore... I guess she will figure it out on her own eventually, in the meantime I really must resist helping her out too much! 

Yesterday Simon cooked up an omelette with some veggies for lunch. We made sure that the eggs were well cooked and then cut it into finger shapes, these were really easy to hold and nice and soft to chew on. She absolutely loved eating the omelette and what a mess she made of it too! Despite the mess though, we are really enjoying having her at the table with us.


Here she is eating a very large piece of melon (left) and munching away on daddy's omelette (right).

Poo update:

We have had a few poopy nappy changes since we started (don't worry, no pictures to follow), and I think that I found some lettuce (well, it was green...) and a few seeds from the bread Simon made for her. How exciting, something is getting through. I wonder how accidental the swallowing is at this stage?

First try with food

Indigo has been joining us at the table, in her highchair, at meal times for a few weeks now. She has increasingly got more bored with her toys and interested in the food on our plates; following fork from plate to mouth slightly beyond herself with excitement and a slight bit of frustration that we are not sharing this very interesting food with her.

So, the other day Simon handed her a piece of lettuce from his plate (not the most exciting item of food some might say, but homegrown from the allotment nevertheless)... It went straight in the mouth and got a good chew - success! The lettuce leaf went limp quite soon, from being covered in saliva and scrunched up in little hands, and she probably didn't swallow much, but she seemed to have fun with it!  

The following day we had a go with sliced cucumber, a stick of raw green pepper and some avocado from our salad. The cucumber was good to hold but too hard to chew, so she sucked it a bit and I think managed to eat the soft center part with the seeds in. The avocado I thought would be the perfect consistency to chew, but turned out to be tricky to hold as it was rather slippy. She did manage to get some in her mouth though, and when it proved too difficult  to hold she worked out that she could pick it off the table with her mouth, what a clever baby (must get that from me). The green pepper was perfect to hold, and she seemed to enjoy chewing on that the most (that could have to do with it being cold and having a good effect on her teething gums??) but it was obviously a bit too hard to take a bite off and eat, so maybe we should steam that next time.

All in all, our first few tries with BLW has been a success. We have enjoyed watching her exploring her food and she has definitely had a great time with the few diffierent things we have tried so far. I shall be inspecting her nappies closely in the next few days and report back on my findings - I have never been quite this excited for her to have her next poop... oh dear!