Feeding Herself

Joanne read this article earlier this week, which raises the possibility of introducing more solid foods to babies at a younger age. The basic idea is that if they can pick the food up, put it in their mouth, and then force it into their throats, they're almost definitely going to be able to swallow it. Obviously you need to closely supervise the activity and only appropriate food should be offered.

Well this made sense to us and we decided to give it a try. The first night was hysterical - basically Cecilia's mission in life right now is to grab everything she sees and put it in her mouth. And if she can't grab it she'll bring her mouth to it and taste it that way (notice the smudges on the little mirror in her room).

Thinking it would be a breeze, I put a small slice of banana on the tray in front of her. She looked at it, picked it up, dropped it on the floor, and then stared intently at the bowl of mashed bananas I had been feeding her from. This went on for 10 minutes as she absolutely refused to feed herself and kept staring at the bowl. It was like she was saying, "come on Dad, quit playing around and feed me already!".

Anyway I found it quite amusing. Last night we tried again as I was basically hand feeding her the contents of some chicken soup I had made. She loved the noodles, carrots and broth (hated the chicken) and after several attempts finally took a small piece of carrot off of her tray, brought it to her mouth, and took a small bite. We call celebrated and she was quite pleased with herself.

The only bad part of the night was when I tried feeding her the broth from a big Chinese soup spoon and she put her nose in it and sucked it up in there. She was not very happy with that but everyone survived.

PS New video camera coming for the Holidays so hopefully we'll be posting footage of her eating by herself soon.