The first picnic

Just in case I didn't rave enough about our new portable highchair last time, I thought I'd better say again how fab it is!

Picnics (or picnic-style indoor eating, given the weather) has been a non-starter with Baby Bean. Within seconds she's seen something on the other side of the room that she wants to play with and is off, speed-crawling to her goal, leaving me chasing her with a wet wipe to get the cream cheese and tomato seeds off her hands before they are embedded in someone's cream carpet! I've tried the following:

1. Sitting her on my knee with a book in one hand to entertain her with, and small pieces of food in the other hand for her to graze from. But those pieces invariably get "sorted" from hand to knee to sofa, back to hand and then to floor. With some smearing into my clothes for good measure.
2. Spreading a wipe clean tablecloth across the majority of floor so she can wander a little, and put her food on that to be nibbled on. But she THROWS things, and they ALWAYS land on the one bit of floor that wasn't covered by the tablecloth. And she crawls through her food!
3. Lugging a full sized highchair from house to house, and thanking God for the fact we chose to buy a Mondeo (for its cavernous boot) as our family car. Not really convenient though and means Bean is 4 foot in the air while the rest of us are on the floor!
4. Feeding her myself - eg. putting small bits of food in her mouth while she's playing, or encouraging her to suck from a puree pouch. But then she's not really part of the meal, and I'm still chasing her around the room, and there's always one time when she absent-mindedly sucks on the pouch before realising she didn't actually want it, and so spits it back out over EVERYTHING!

But now we have the Amazing Travelling Highchair and all is well :-)

So this Bank Holiday weekend we got invited to a BBQ by our good friends and neighbours. It was our first BBQ since she came along and thanks to our new highchair (and the rather wonderful cooking skills of our friends), I wasn't even a little bit nervous. Not about the mess (we'd be outdoors), not about Bean wandering off into the vegetable patch or the pond or the BBQ (she'd be safely in her seat), and not about whether I needed to take food with us (see the aforementioned good cooking).

And I was right. It was a brilliant evening. And Bean ate loads, including her first BBQ'd sausage, burger and corn on the cob!