Hannah Gets the Giggles

This will be a quick update of the last two days. Breakfast yesterday was cheerios and a few shreddies, and today it was shreddies as we're out of cheerios. Hannah also had a few of my cranberry wheats - out of my bowl too, cheeky minx.

Lunch today was pretend carbonara, pasta spirals with creme fraiche and some baco bits stirred through. She followed this up with some grapes and a quartered pear as well as a fromage frais. We had a breakthrough with the fromage frais, too. For the first time ever, Hannah held the spoon out for me to take off her after each mouthful. Normally it's hit and miss whether it ends up on the floor, on the cat, on the highchair somewhere...you get the idea! So a definite step forward, hopefully it'll happen next time too.

Yesterday Hannah had some potato wedges, plus some butterscotch flavour angel delight for pudding - she ate loads, which was rather disappointing as we were sharing it and I didn't get as much as I expected to!

Dinner yesterday was baked tomatoes and pesto, again Hannah ate loads - 4 tomatoes to be exact, followed by half a dozen grapes, 1 1/2 pears and precisely no segments of orange.

The orange was too tart for her, she pulled a face and did a whole-body judder when she tasted it. She scared me a bit with the grapes, she put them in her mouth whole and while she did bite into them the chewing was...well frankly she couldn't be bothered with the whole idea of chewing. She tried to swallow two grapes whole, and we had a moment before she managed to spit them out. However all was fine, and my heart rate slowed down eventually!

Today for dinner, Hannah ate two slices of cheese on toast. She ate all of it, including the toast all except a couple of crusts. And for some reason she got the giggles, so obviously I had to get a video of it - nothing to do with the fact I was pulling faces at her, I'm sure!

Milk strike?

For breakfast today Hannah ate another tonne of shredded wheat bitesize, it's amazing how many of them she manages to put away.

Lunch was toad in the hole with mash and gravy, served en famille. She did really well with the mash, having figured out how to hold it firmly enough to pick up, but not so firm that it squished out through her fingers. Well, after the first attempt anyway. It's really the first time I've seen her manage that kind of fine motor control. She's growing up!

For dinner she had a lot of different things. There were some sticks of red leicester, a raspberry fromage frais, a bit more chocolate angel delight, some halved tinned apricots, and a rusk. Plus water to go with it. I tried letting Hannah control the spoon completely by herself, which didn't quite work. Once I'd put it into the pot for her it worked much better. I also tried breaking the rusk and letting her dunk that in the fromage frais, and that worked rather better than the spoon. Well, sort of. She definitely needs more practice at the whole "not covering everything in fromage frais" thing.

As you can see, she's making a move for the pot of fromage frais...

...and wins!

Today Hannah really hasn't had all that much milk. She's been having expressed feeds from bottles for the past couple of days - on account of having bitten me and drawn blood, evil child. Which means I've been able to see exactly how much milk she's getting. Anyway, she had 150ml at her midafternoon feed, and only 100ml before she went to bed. Her morning feed (the only one she's still getting breastfed at for the moment) was shorter than normal, too, at only 6 minutes start to finish.

At this point I'm putting it down to the increasingly huge portions of solid food she's tucking away, but I'll be keeping an eye on things for the next few days to see what happens. Perhaps it's time to drop that midafternoon feed afterall?

Pasta bake v cauliflower cheese

Hannah has got more teeth, the two top middle ones have now turned up, a week or two after the ones immediately outside them. So with six teeth to use on her food, we've definitely noticed she's getting better at biting - us as well as the food!

Breakfast has been cranberry wheats (Friday) and shredded wheat bitesize (Saturday). She ate an absolutely HUGE amount yesterday - about the same as I'd eat, if not even more. I couldn't believe she'd finished the bowlful, but there was very little left behind to find in the clean up.

Her lunches have been cauliflower cheese and pasta bake. The cauliflower cheese was fairly successul - much more so that last time I tried her with it. It was very messy, but I'll definitely make it for her again. She even ate quite a bit of the cauliflower, which in the past she hasn't really seemed very interested in. The pasta bake wasn't so successful, probably on account of the millions of shredded wheat she'd filled up on at breakfast. The fromage frais that followed it though was well received - enthusiastic shrieks in between sucking the spoon clean is always a sign.

As you can see, she's keen on the cauli (this time):

But what's going on outside is much more interesting (high wind making a for sale sign flip to and fro):


...but even that gets boring after a while!:

For dinner, on Friday Hannah ate a cream cheese and avocado sandwich followed by a fromage frais. She did pretty well with the sandwich - although she pulled the bread apart to get at the filling better - but didn't eat all of the avocado, prefering to pull it out and cast it aside. I'd slightly mashed half an avocado so that I could spread it, I think in future I'd slice it instead so that she can pick it up better if she deconstructs the sandwich.

Yesterday she had half a baked potato, with the inside scooped out and mixed with a little cream cheese, plus a corn thin also with cream cheese. For pudding she ate a portion of chocolate flavoured angel delight. I have never seen her so excited about food, I don't think! The squeals and flailing legs and arms were some indication of what she thought of it :o) Neil was feeding her, and he noticed that she seemed to be drinking a lot of water during the process too, she'd have a mouthful or two of the angel delight and then have a bit of water in between, and she carried on doing this the whole time.

Still not a fan of cauliflower cheese

Today Hannah ate cheerios for breakfast, then had the cauliflower cheese that she didn't want yesterday for lunch, along with some grapes cut in half, a slice of melon in chunks, and half a portion of butterscotch angel delight.

She still isn't a fan of cauliflower cheese and didn't eat very much of it at all. The melon didn't seem to be ripe enough for Hannah to cope with easily, so she didn't pay it very much attention. Fortunately she loved the grape halves, and the angel delight too. The angel delight got a similar reaction as rice pudding did the other week, she dived for the spoon as we were attempting to hand it to her, and she made "num num" noises while she was eating it.

For tea, Hannah ate an oatcake with cream cheese on, another with lentil pate on, a breadstick, a clementine, and the remainder of lunchtime's angel delight. For the first time in ages Hannah gagged on some of the oatcake and hastily spat it out. She didn't seem remotely bothered by this, and carried on with the rest of her meal regardless.

Another first today, she only had half a breastfeed at 11am, and none at all at 3pm, so I gave her a sippy cup full of formula along with her tea to make sure she's getting enough milk. She actually drank most of it, I think the first time she's drunk significant amounts out of the sippy cup.