Day 8: Clementines

Clementine season is upon us, and we're going through clementines like water. We're already on our second case and I only bought the first one a week ago. I'll peel one or two and put a few segments on the table for Grace to eat if she wants. She'll then proceed to half-chew a couple and then spit them out and leave the half-chewed pieces around the living room. She'll pick them up and hand them to me, if I ask, so it's not like they're still there rotting away.
Clementines and hand washing are my way of handling cold and flu season.

Day 7: Boo.

So, I had this great dinner in the oven: chicken, roasted veggies, baked potatoes. Then I took it out of the oven and burned myself on the pan and dropped it all over the floor.
We got food from Wawa.
Needless to say, I'm not in the mood to talk all positive about food today.
That is all.

Day 6: Rice Cereal?

In a USA Today article, Alan Greene, a pediatrician at Stanford University's Lucile Packard Children's Hospital is encouraging parents to start babies with brown rice cereal or vegetable purees instead of the highly processed rice cereal that many babies have been eating for years. The idea is that white rice processed into a puree cereal for babies is about the most processed form of a grain you can get, whereas a brown rice cereal or vegetable puree will be more nutritious. This was my thinking exactly when we were starting solids. I didn't understand how, when many nutrition recommendations include eating more whole grains, babies would be started on solid foods with an excessively processed food.
We started with sweet potato and banana. Now she eats almost any food that's soft or small enough for her to chew with her gums. Some allergenic foods she hasn't had yet include strawberries, tomatoes, peanuts, tree nuts, fish and shellfish. She's had cake, but not candy or chocolate. She also only drinks breastmilk or water. We haven't given her milk or juice yet, not to mention soda or coffee or anything like that.
We aren't the world's healthiest eaters, but we're doing ok.

Day 5: Starbucks Sunday

We've developed a fun routine of going to the Starbucks where I used to work and having breakfast, just Grace and I. I get a latte and Grace gets a cherry yogurt. Sometimes a banana is involved. She can totally decimate that yogurt, which I'm still surprised at despite the fact that she's been doing so for months. It's fun  to visit people and do something different from our normal weekday routine. We're kind of limited to what yogurt she can have, though, because the other two involve strawberries, which she hasn't had because I'm paranoid about introducing strawberries because I had an allergic reaction when I was little, or honey, which she hasn't had because of the risk of botulism. Some day she'll try both of those things, then she'll have to pick one, but until then, it's just the cherry.
Maybe tomorrow I'll write about how she can make decisions about breakfast or what she'll wear for the day.

Day 4: Pretending Day 3 doesn't exist

If I don't pretend that yesterday just doesn't exist, then I'll get all self-conscious (even though no one is reading this, which is totally ok) and want to either back date an entry so it looks like I posted every day or delete everything and start over. I really would like to be able to go back in time to yesterday and post the stupid little blurb about bananas that I was thinking would be ok, but I can't, so we'll just move forward like everything is fine and it will be.

So, bananas. I feel like she's been eating bananas for ever, but obviously she hasn't been alive that long. Bananas are our go to fruit, though. During the summer, I would put almost-too-ripe-to-eat bananas in the freezer, broken up into thirds, and she would gnaw on them when it was crazy hot out. Now, she'll eat almost a whole banana for breakfast if and only if the "better" part of breakfast hasn't been presented to her yet. I'll sit her in her highchair while I'm still gathering our breakfast and she'll happily munch on as much banana as I give her. Once she sees the bowl of yogurt or the sausage or whatever it is, the banana goes on the floor and she'll only look at it as if to say, "ew, you want me to eat what now?"

It's also almost like the amount of banana she's eaten has no influence on what she'll eat afterwards. Some days she'll eat a whole banana plus anything else I'll put in front of her. Some days she'll eat one chunk of banana and three or four bites of yogurt and that's it. It's probably better that she eat when she's hungry and that I don't try to force her to eat more.

Day Two: Broccoli

I put some broccoli spears in when I was cooking pasta for my lunch. There I was, eating pasta and broccoli for my lunch and Grace had quesadilla for her lunch. I was giving her pieces of my pasta to try, which she was taking small bites from then throwing on the floor. Then she started pointing at my pasta. I thought she wanted more pasta but when I tried to give her more, she kept pointing. I gave her a spear of broccoli and she happily munched on it.
Strange things happen when you least expect it.

Day 1: Where We Are Now

Writing and posting late in the day, so I'll keep it short so I can at least say I posted something.

We've gotten into a good routine of sorts for our weekday breakfasts and lunches. Breakfast is some sort of fruit (usually banana), then yogurt or sausage. It was chobani yogurt with fruit for a while, but recently we switched to a plain yogurt with some fruit added. She'll gobble down a whole order of sausage when we go to the diner, so I've been cooking her some sausage for breakfast during the week some times.
Lunch for the past few months has been cheese quesadilla, sometimes with something else in addition like pepperoni or some of what I'm eating for lunch.

It's dinner that we have the most variability and, to be honest, that I have the most trouble with. I'm trying to make more vegetables for her, but it's not really something I'm that great at doing on a consistent basis. We've taken to giving her a pouch of veggie puree some days, which I'm just deciding I'm ok with and not feeling guilt over.

I'm trying little by little to get more variety of foods into her diet, but it's slow going.