Daily schedules

A couple of people have been asking me what kind of schedule we follow during the day with Hannah's feeds and things, so I'll try and explain it below.

First though, a run through of today's food. Breakfast was shredded wheat bitesize, another huge portion of them that almost all got eaten. For lunch Hannah had an omelette with mushrooms and cheese, followed by some tinned fruit cocktail. The fruit cocktail went down much better than last time we tried it, and she was easily able to deal with the pieces although they're actually quite small. For dinner she just had a cream cheese sandwich and some more fruit cocktail.

The daily routine works like this:
7.30am - Hannah gets up and has a breastfeed before getting dressed
8.30am - solid breakfast, usually takes about 20 minutes
9.00am - naptime! Length anything from 30mins to 2 hours
11.00am - Hannah gets up from her first nap and comes downstairs to play
12.00 - solid lunch, usually takes about 30 minutes
1.00pm - naptime again, normally about 90 minutes
3pm - milk feed, if expressed then about 200ml
4.30pm - naptime again, usually only 30 minutes at this one unless she's had a short nap earlier in the day
5.30pm - solid dinner, usually takes 20-30 minutes as she's getting tired by now
6.15pm - bedtime routine starts - milk feed, brush teeth, nappy, sleeping bag etc and settle down to quiet play - we cuddle and sometimes watch In the Night Garden or read a bedtime story.
7.00pm - Upstairs and in to bed, she normally settles very well and that's it until morning.

We don't always stick strictly to nap times - for example if we're off out then I'll get her up early and she seems to make up for it later in the day. At the moment I try to make sure she goes for a nap every 2 to 2 1/2 hours so she doesn't get grumpy and overtired. If that does happen it has a huge knock-on effect on her eating - she mostly wants milk not solids, which puts her to sleep.

Happy Pancake Day!

Happy pancake day everyone! (Or, as the advertisers would have us believe, happy jif lemon day.) It seemed rude not to offer Hannah the chance of pancakes today, so that's what she had for her lunch - two of them, one with cream cheese in and the other with hummus in. I haven't quite gone so far as to sprinkle sugar on her food...

For breakfast she had half shredded wheat bitesize and half cranberry wheats. It was funny watching her eat them, as once she figured out some had cranberry filling in she systematically went through and bit into each one. If it didn't have filling it quickly got discarded, although she did eventually go back to them once she'd eaten all the cranberry ones.

For dinner Hannah had a slice of cheese on toast, plus some tinned fruit cocktail. All in all though she hasn't really eaten much today, and she hasn't drunk extra milk either. She has, however, been suffering with a horrendous bout of nappy rash - all meals eaten picnic style on towels in the living room as I kept her nappy free for most of the day.

It made life a bit interesting, and rather than put her head down for a rest part way through the meal, since she wasn't in the high chair she had a quick lie down instead!

As for yesterday's food, breakfast was shredded wheat, while lunch was scrambled egg on toast. She didn't eat much of the scrambled egg, but got through a surprising amount of the toast, so yay! Her dinner was a few quorn pieces with peas and carrots. She didn't have any of the carrots, ate about half a dozen peas, and most of the quorn pieces. Not sure what was going on there, as previously she's gone for both carrots and peas in preference to other things.

Fingers crossed her nappy rash is better tomorrow.