Cauliflower and mandarin segments

Hannah had lots of new things to try today - but not at breakfast, which was the last of the Raisin Wheats with a dash of whole milk.

Lunch was the first of the new tastes, as well as some old favourites. She had a rice cake with lentil pate on - a thin rice cake, which it turns out are much easier to cut up than the normal thicker ones. This was followed by a steamed carrot and a couple of cauliflower florets, and finally there were some mandarin segments for pudding.

I don't know if you've noticed, but Hannah usually has a combination of hot and cold food at meals. This is because I'm usually in a rush to get something served and in front of her, and she doesn't have much patience with sitting in the high chair waiting for stuff to cool down. So a cunning trick is to offer something cold to keep her occupied while the hot food gets to the right temperature. I have in the past just run things under the cold tap, but I don't find it works quite as well.

Anyway, the cauliflower was dumped straight on the floor after the first taste, and generally greeted with suspicion. After another few attempts she changed her mind and decided to give it the benefit of the doubt - still not the most popular item ever served though. She also didn't pay that much attention to the carrot, in the past this has been a favourite so I'm not sure what was going on there.

Mandarin segments, it turns out, are a lot more sour than I remembered. Oops. To her credit, once Hannah had got over the first taste (see picture), she warmed to them and went back for more. She ate most of them in the end and seemed to enjoy it.

Tea today was tomato, basil and mozzarella tortellini, which I was expecting her to really go for. She did sort of go for it, but I spent the first five minutes of the meal picking pasta up off the floor. Normally stuff is thrown mainly to one side of the high chair or the other, but in a new attack of being perverse, Hannah developed a decent shot put action to alternate sides, so I think I ran the 1500m over the course of the meal. To be fair she didn't throw the apricot halves around quite so much, which was a relief.

To drink today, Hannah had her first taste of juice. We diluted a small amount of fresh fruit juice with a rather larger amount of cooled boiled water. For the first time I had to refill the sippy cup before the last meal of the day, as she'd managed to drink more of it than I was expecting.

In summary then, an interesting day!

Pancakes

Raisin wheats again for breakfast, today with slightly less milk to see if it helped the wheats stay together - it did. They didn't break apart as quickly which meant that she seemed to eat more of them.



Lunch was batons of courgette fried in butter, oatcakes with lentil pate and finally baby plum tomatoes cut in half. She enjoyed the tomatoes, as well as sucking out the innards she also gave the flesh a good chomping and seemed to make some headway eating it. The oatcakes, or at least the lentil pate, were as popular as usual, but she rejected the courgette - several times she picked it up but threw it down as soon as she tasted it, so we took it away and left her with the tomato and oatcakes.



For pudding she had rusk and apricot halves, both of which were a hit. She ate most of the rusk and a fair bit of the apricot.



Dinner saw a new food on the menu: pancakes! Hannah had one half filled with cream cheese, the other half filled with a mix of cream cheese and blackcurrant jam. The pancake was rolled up then sliced into lengths of about 1 1/2 inches. Hannah really enjoyed them both but the cream cheese on its own actually worked a lot better: it tended to glue the rolled up pieces together quite well, so it stayed more intact. The jam made the pieces slide apart so had the opposite effect.


She really enjoyed the pancakes and polished off a large amount, so that's definitely a success and will be appearing again, which is no bad thing because we all enjoyed tucking into pancakes together! We had lemon and sugar on ours, maybe Hannah can have a little of that next time.


Here she is with a roll of pancake:

Return of The Sausage

Breakfast was again raisin wheats with full fat milk. Similar amount of mess to yesterday, but I think she may have eaten a little more today.

Lunch saw the return of sausage and mashed potato, this time with apple & rosemary veggie sausages. Hannah seemed to like these just as much as her first taste of sausage, as seen in the photo. She did a better job of chewing up the sausage this time, possibly helped by her teeth, and because she was able to chew it into smaller pieces I think she also ate more. Quite a lot of potato also disappeared.

For pudding she had a rusk. She started with it whole, but then we broke it in half which she found a lot easier, she ended up eating quite a lot of rusk actually.

Also in the photo you can see the hairbands around the cut-off wrists of her bib, we've been using those for a few days since we cut off the arms and that's working well - a lot easier than rolling up the sleeves every time.

Dinner was cut short because it started late and she was getting a little tired, but she still had a determined go at half a dozen eggy bread soldiers, including a few games of throw it over the side then peer after it. The late start was due to an emergency post-nappy change bath...least said soonest mended.

I Can Eat A Rainbow

Breakfast was back to raisin wheats with full fat milk. As before she tended to crush them by gripping them too tightly, but made considerably less mess than last time. I'm not sure why - it's possible that she ate more, but it's hard to tell.

Lunch was a colourful affair of red, yellow and green: red baby plum tomatoes sliced in half lengthways, yellow pepper cut into slices, steamed in the microwave then skinned, green courgette fried in butter. She seemed to like tomato the best, sucking out the innards of each one which is exactly what she did last time. She also enjoyed the courgette, as you can see in the photo. Pepper was a bit slippy but when it made it into her mouth she liked that as well. She did mostly go for the tomato, though.

For pudding she had a slice of melon, always a big hit! It's fair to say that she's perfected the art of stripping all the flesh off, leaving just the rind to be cleared away.

Dinner was pasta again, with tomato and mascarpone sauce spiced up a little with some more fresh baby plum tomatoes. As per, she sucked all the sauce off the pasta, sucked the innards out of the tomatoes and left the tomato husks with the bare pasta.

For pudding she had a raspberry fromage frais which she was a bit too enthusiastic about - she ate about half as usual then managed to fling the rest on the floor, table legs, chair legs, herself... The problems started when she grabbed the pot and tried to drink from it like a cup, but got her mouth on the 'top' side side instead of the bottom, as if trying to get rid of hiccups. It all went downhill from there...

In other news, she's consistently taking less milk on her pre-dinner breastfeed, suggesting that she's regularly eating quite a bit of food at lunchtime, as well as continuing to take less than the full 7oz (200ml) dream feed. We also took her to be weighed today, she came in at 16lb 4oz (7.4Kg for our international viewers), which is a healthy gain of 1lb 2 oz (510g) in 3 weeks, so she seems to be thriving on BLW!

She's also developed a new trick: she drops things off the side of the tray, then leans over and peers down at them. Special fairy magic means they usually reappear back on the tray, where she once again pounces on them.

Threeee is the magic number

Back to three meals today, starting with raisin wheats with full fat milk for breakfast. She's getting better at manipulating them, but still has a way to go: she tends to grip them a bit too forcefully so they get crushed and turn into raisin wheat mush. Today's raisin wheat mush spread from eyebrows to chin, from fingers to elbow and all across the tray. Still, Hannah seemed to enjoy it and might even have eaten some.

Lunch was the remainder of the tomato and Boursin tart, which she seemed a little less ethusiastic about than the first time at least to start with. But she did get into her stride after a while and seemed to get through a reasonable amount, photo below shows the tart before it had sustained the full-on Hannah Attack. By the end I was practically scraping it off with a trowel...

Pudding was 4 halves of apricot with an apricot fromage frais. It was the first time she's tasted apricot so it was greeted in the usual way: she froze as she got the first taste, then raised her eyebrows, then frowned, then dropped it. Then went straight back at it. Second taste she's a little hesitant, then usually by the third taste she's tucking in happily. As usual we gave her the fromage frais on a spoon which she operates herself, and as usual she tended to grab the spoon end with one hand so half of it ends up between her fingers. But from there it mostly winds up in her mouth, so all's well that ends well.

For tea she had pasta tubes with tomato and mascarpone sauce. She did very well at manipulating the pasta tubes, but I don't think she really ate any. However, she did remove all traces of the sauce from every tube so that's a partial success! By the end she had a pile of plain pasta and a slight pinkish orange tint to the tray, so we moved that away and brought in pudding, which was 4 more halves of apricot. She dived straight in without hesitation this time and seems to quite like apricot, all four pieces getting a bit of a mauling.

Only 2 meals, and bib trimming

For breakfast Hannah had raisin wheats with full fat milk, pineapple batons, melon chunks and mango wedges. She seemed to go for the pineapple most today, giving it a pretty vigorous going over. She also did better today with the raisin wheats than in the past as she's getting better at picking them up pincer-style, rather than grabbing and crushing them in her fist.

The plan was to have lunch while we were out at playgroup, taking a packed lunch with me - roast dinner leftovers from yesterday, along with her cup of water. But she got quite cranky from all the distractions and the disruption to her morning nap, so I decided not to bother with lunch as she wasn't in the mood.

Dinner, you might not be surprised to learn, was roast dinner leftovers! Quorn fillet, two roast potatoes, roast parsnip and roast carrot which she went at with gusto, managing to eat a surprising amount of everything, possibly due to the lack of lunch.

In other news, we've modified one of the ELC painting bibs by cutting part of the arms off. The problem was that the size is age 2-3 years so on a 7 month old it's a bit ... roomy. Previously we've been rolling the sleeves back but that's become a chore plus she's been getting food down in the folded cuffs, which is a pain to clean out. The sleeves are now approximately the correct length unrolled, but without the elasticated cuff they are a bit gaping, so food could get in. Hmm. For tomorrow we'll be experimenting with something along the lines of a hair band around the wrist.

Yummy in her tummy

We do seem to be back on track after the difficulties of the last few weeks, and Hannah dove right into the veggie sausage and mash I offered her at lunchtime. Well, I say mash, it was boiled potato to start with but that didn't last long! Five minutes in and it definitely looked more like mash than potato to me. The sausage got demolished too, there's hardly any of it left at all.

Sausage and potato makes quite a tidy lunch too, there's only a limited amount of mushing possible, so that's good. It's a shame the sausage is quite salty, so won't be served very often. All I did was cut it in half lengthways, perfect finger food!

Breakfast was Raisin Wheats, served with a tinned pear this time instead of banana. Hannah preferred the pear to the cereal, she only deigned to notice the cereal once most of the pear had been eaten.

Ooh, and there was another pear (the last one) for pudding after lunch. Better get another tin of them next time I go shopping, she's eaten the lot!

A good day

Neil was in charge of today's breakfast, and it was a repeat of yesterdays - Raisin wheats with full fat milk and a banana. As you can see from the picture below, we don't usually give Hannah a bowl to eat from, she's not quite got the hang of them yet!

I was back on duty for lunch, and offered carrot, parsnip and sweet potato along with a breadstick and some lentil pate (which is now stored in the freezer), and a rusk and tinned pear for pudding. For once Hannah wasn't that impressed with the sweet potato, she preferred going at the breadstick. She really liked the pear, and since there's half a tin of them left in the fridge she's in luck! The rusk went down well again too, in fact more of it got eaten today than last time.

Hannah's been very tired for the past two days, sleeping a fair bit more than she has been of late, but if anything this has made her feed better than normal - both with solid food and with breastfeeding. We've moved to mixed feeding this week as well, so she's having one bottle of formula in the evening before bed and the rest of the time is breastfed. It means that I don't have to express first thing in the morning and makes it much quicker to get up and about with Hannah. So far so good, but if anything changes I'll keep you posted.

Omelette and using a cup

Breakfast broke with tradition today, Hannah had Raisin Wheats (like mini shredded wheat with raisins on the inside) and seemed to quite like them. I only used a little bit of milk with them, so they didn't disintegrate too badly, and she managed better than I'd feared at getting them to her mouth. A couple of times she managed to suck the end off one to get the raisin out of the middle, and this made her splutter a bit as the strands of wheat detached and went to the back of her mouth. She followed the raisin wheats with half a banana (I ate the other half!) and even managed to use her cup by herself for the first time - I caught it on camera:

For lunch she had more new things - this time a one egg cheese omelette. She pulled a very strange face at her first taste, but did go back and try it again after a bit of thought. Then she decided she liked it, and ate quite a bit of it, so all in all it was a success.

As well as the omelette she had some sweet potato, carrot and parsnip sticks that were left over from yesterday, and a strawberry flavoured fromage frais for her afters. Again she drank a bit out of her cup, so she's definitely starting to get the hang of that - it's only taken about three weeks!