I don't know why I bother *sulk*

Hannah ate shreddies for breakfast again today, and lunch was a mixed platter of different stuff. There was a fruit cereal bar, some cubes of cheese (red leicester and cheddar), a breadstick, two oatcakes with moroccan chickpea pate on, some french beans, a slice of cheese on toast (not in the original plan, but nicked off me), and two apple rice cakes. Ooh, and some raisins too. I should have remembered that, I took pictures of her using her fancy pincer grip to pick them up:

For dinner I cooked some garlic and herb tortellini, and mixed it with some tomato puree and pesto, Unfortunately Hannah spent the entire meal throwing it all on the floor, I don't think she actually ate a whole piece of it, although she got half way through a few of them. For afters there was two slices of melon. The first slice was chopped up as normal, into about five pieces. These she nibbled at but didn't seem all that keen on. The other slice I'd just cut into two pieces, and the bigger bits were all eaten.

So my conclusion from today is that Hannah likes either very small pieces of food like raisins, or very large pieces of food, like melon slices. If it falls somewhere in between, then maybe she'll eat it, maybe she won't. I think it depends on what direction the wind is blowing from, and whether she's got purple pants on. Or something.

Gnocchi not bad!

Another nappy free day today, but I've figured out that folding a towel and putting it in the high chair works well enough to soak up any accidents during meals - although thankfully we haven't had any.

Breakfast was half cranberry wheats, half shredded wheat again, and Hannah ate lots of them yet again. She's figured out that there's food in her hand as well as the bit that's poking out of the top of her fist, and she's now pushing that bit into her mouth rather than just dropping it when she reaches for the next bit of food. Not every time, but mostly.

For lunch we picniced in the living room again, and Hannah ate a bit of sandwich. Half of it had lentil pate in, a quarter had cream cheese and cucumber, and the other quarter had hummus and cucumber. To my surprise she did actually go for the cucumber today, and ate 3 or 4 slices of it. The bread mostly got mauled, she left all of the crust and a fair amount of the rest of it too. For pudding she ate a whole pear, and still acted hungry so I cut her up another pear, and she ate 3/4 of it! Can't believe how much she put away! She's still carefully spitting out the skin of the pear, but all the flesh had gone.

Dinner was her first taste of gnocchi with tomato and basil sauce with a bit of grated cheese sprinkled on top. She really liked the gnocchi, which was good to see, and ate all of what I gave her. However she got far more excited about the prospect of fromage frais and rusk for pudding - and here's a video of her with the fromage frais:

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?

Lunch AND Breakfast

Happy half birthday to Hannah, she's 6 months old today. We celebrated by letting her have two meals today, instead of the one she's been used to.

Breakfast was done en famille again, Hannah had wholemeal toast, one slice with unsalted butter, one with seedless raspberry jam - didn't offer marmite today. It definitely works better when it's cut into four fingers per slice, so that's what we did today. Received well again today, but I put too much jam on one bit of the toast, so Hannah was rather sticky by the end of the meal.

Lunch was a rice cake with cream cheese spread on it, a steamed potato cut into fingers, some emmental and red leicester fingers, and finally some melon chunks for pudding. Hannah wasn't very impressed with the potato, and I don't think she spent much time trying to eat it, it mostly got thrown on the floor. The rice cake was popular, and a surprising amount of it disappeared, I assume she swallowed it. The cheese was gummed at but not much actually went down, and the melon was just as popular as it was the other day. Mind you, she seemed to spend most of the meal blowing raspberrys, I thought we were past that stage but it's back with a vengeance.

In other news, I saw the apron/bibs that Ikea do yesterday, and I'm glad we got ours from the Early Learning Centre, as they're definitely better than the Ikea ones. The problem (in my opinion!) with the Ikea ones is that the plastic bib bit doesn't wrap roundthe body, it's just a sheet of plastic that hangs down. Also they had a pocket at the bottom, which might make a good food catcher, but would be annoying to clean out, Also they only had them in green and blue, one of each colour in the pack.

Same as yesterday

Since yesterday's lunch was a bit of a non-starter, today's involved leftovers, plus a fromage frais - peach flavoured this time.

Fromage frais definitely seems to be the favourite item, with cheese a close second today. Carrot and parsnip were tolerated, but since they are the same colour as the two cheeses on offer, they probably got more attention than they would have otherwise! Cunning, eh? :oD

The fromage frais went down so well that Hannah actually grabbed the pot off me and tried to eat it directly:

Managed to get some video again today, sorry for the poor camera work - comes from trying to supervise lunch and use the camera at the same time! As you can see, the aim still needs some work - fromage frais isn't a great eyeshadow.

Cheese and steamed veggies

Hannah's having problems cutting these teeth again, so was a bit upset and not very interested in food this lunchtime. I offered her some red leicester and emmental cheese, along with some steamed parsnip and carrot batons. She did spend a bit of time sucking at the cheese, but it was very lacklustre and after only ten minutes or so the crying started, so I took her out of the highchair.

She wouldn't breastfeed either, so ended up having lunch of expressed milk, as that's easier and less painful for her to eat. The Calpol and Calgel might have helped too.

We did manage to get a pic of the new bib in action though: