Food

Dining is starting to settle down a bit. We're almost at a point I can live with. She eats with us, but she eats her own food. For L and I, I make the usual grown-up food. For the little one I usually roast some vegetables. No spices, just roasted at low temperature (125-150°C) for a few hours. I start the oven when I start dinner. Chop some combination of mushrooms (She really likes the mushrooms), onions, peppers, aubergines, celery, potatoes or whatever else we have at hand. Put it in a dish and take it out after we're done eating. Put it in the fridge, then dole it out over the next few days.

I have to say, the stuff tastes brilliant. I've never really had the patience for roast veg for meals before, but this works really well, since it's so little work and prepped in advance. It's hard for me to not pick at the food meant for her. Though I draw the line at not taking food from her tray.

My only concern is that it really does taste better on the day it's cooked. But it does still taste ok after being refrigerated a few days.

We feed her by putting a selection of stuff on her tray,and letting her pick it up. She's done when she doesn't try to eat anything new we put down.

Breakfast is less exciting – sliced fruits: Banana, orange, apple. Whatever else we have around – carrots, tomatoes. I do need to start having a more consistent set of breakfast foods around. Like toast.

We used to try to put her to sleep before dinner. At first she'd be in the moses basket we kept in the dining room. She'd often sleep for the first 10 minutes of dinner, then start crying. One of us would gulp down dinner and settle her, while the other would eat. Usually it'd end up with L feeding her.

After a while she'd sleep through dinner. She graduated to sleeping in her own cot. We'd aim a video phone at her and watch her over skype on the laptop. This often degraded to one of us bolting downstairs to collect the crying girl, bringing her upstairs til she was calm again.

After 6 months had passed we started baby-led weaning. Which started off very slowly. She'd take the stuff, put it in her mouth. Chew, sometimes completely masticating it. Then it'd just fall out on the tray of her high chair. I started with simple easy to grab food like carrot sticks, celery, sliced peppers and cucumber. It certainly helped her master grabbing things. She was holding between thumb and index finger quite deftly. But that was pretty much all she got out of it. This went on for a couple of months. It seemed any food she'd ingest was by accident.

It was really cute at first. She'd make a horrible face whenever she was introduced to a new food. This stopped pretty quickly, and the only food she's really reacted too since was a mushroom from a thai green curry. I suspect it was too hot for her. I recently tried feeding her a chunk of lemon (seeds removed) to see if she'd replicate the looks in the babies tasting lemon for the first time video. She ate it right up. Yum.

We got to the point where we were about to give up the baby-led weaning. We decided to feed her puree one meal a day.

Day one worked. She at an entire meal.

Day two, she started to be dubious about the puree.

At day 3 she was refusing the puree entirely. And eating solids. It's like she realised that if she did not get on with eating the real food we give her, she'd have nothing but this mush forever. Which, in fact, was more or less true. Or perhaps she finally figured out how to swallow. Which seems more true, but doesn't sound as nice.

So what's next? At some point we need to start feeding her more grown-up food. I'd like to be able to only have to make one meal. I also need to get more D and iron in her diet – since she's not getting much from milk.

The real downside here is the output. Her stool really smells bad now. And is much less pleasant to clean up. She's defecating far less now, and she's using the loo for most of it. But that just makes the dirty misses even harder to deal with.