Food hats

I'm not a great one for mess.

There, I've said it! It's something I didn't know about myself before we started baby led weaning. I thought I was quite relaxed about things getting mucky and was well aware that weaning of any kind would involve the smearing of food in places that it shouldn't be smeared.

But then my darling baby reached out a tomato pasta-covered hand to my bare arm (not even a white sleeve there to justify this) and I flinched!! I was really surprised! But it turns out I really don't like getting messy!

So, after 9months of weaning I'm pretty much ok with the bits that go to the floor, and I'm fine with sweeping out the highchair, and I've even come to terms with a yoghurt covered face, hands and arms (as long as they aren't mine, that is!). But, as if sensing that new levels of mess were required now, Bean has started decorating her hair. :-)

First we had this, carefully balanced pieces of food. I was actually quite impressed and, perhaps mistakenly, clapped and laughed. Because next we had this:

 

Yep, that is indeed tomato sauce matted into her lovely blonde hair! Fortunately she doesn't have much hair (can you imagine if she did?! Aaaaaaarrrrrgggghhhhhhhhh!).

 

So how on earth did this come to be, I hear you ask? Or perhaps this isn't that odd an occurrence in your house either! For us, it came about because my Other Half played hide-the-toy with her, and he hid it by putting it behind his head and dropping it down his t-shirt.

 

A very funny game, yes? And when cranberries and raisins drop out of her vest everytime we undress her it is pretty amusing. As it also is when Bean tries to fit a book down there. :-D But then she did this one mealtime and we realised things were about to get very messy:

 

 

Hmm, think I'll be playing the "I made the meal so OH can do the tidying up" card now!



The Throwing Phase, Take 2000!

Now this was one I thought we'd grown out of. Giving Baby Bean free reign with all sorts of potential-for-creating-havoc foods was always one of my least favourite parts of BLW, but after the first few months I thought we'd cracked Bean's desire to throw.

And then we clearly hadn't!

And then I thought we had.

But no, it would appear not......and so on!

So far we've had the following Throwing Phases:

1) The not-really-able-to-grasp-so-dropping-accidently phase
2) The moving-things-around-the-tray-and-pushing-some-off-in-the-process phase
3) The oops-I-dropped-it-but-I-want-to-eat-it phase
4) The oooo-what-happens-when-I-do-this-phase
5) The hold-it-over-the-edge-while-smiling-at-mummy-and-saying-no phase (one of my personal favourites as it was actually quite funny)
6) The sorting-it phase
7) The I-DON'T-WANT-IT phase
8) The I-DON'T-WANT-IT-oh-I-do-want-it-I-DON'T-WANT-IT-oh-I-do-want-it-I-DON'T-WANT-IT....... phase
9) The clearing-the-tray-by-swiping-it phase
10) The moving-it-out-the-way-to-eat-all-the-peas-first phase

But now we have the GRRRRRRR-why-can't-I-pick-it-up-with-this-fork tantrum phase, combined with a rather random careful-picking-up-one-item-in-each-hand-to-drop-them-over-the-side-of-the-highchair phase.

WTF??????

The first phase I can understand. Baby Bean is clearly frustrated, chasing peas and sweetcorn and pasta around her tray with a misbehaving fork. Her fine motor skills are so good when using her hands she just doesn't understand why she can't get the damn fork to make contact with the thing she's aiming it at!

But the other phase? The one that's just appeared these last few days? What's that all about? If I grab her hands she looks up at me, calm as anything, and goes right back to eating. Sometimes she'll look over the side and go "Oh no!!!!" But usually her picking and dropping gets faster and faster and the only recourse I have is to remove all the food faster than she can.

I do have some theories - it's a new way to announce she's full and/or bored, or maybe it's linked to frustration and she simply "dumps" it all when it doesn't do what she wants, or perhaps it's a return to sorting and trajectory experiments. But given that we'd made some major headway on Bean eating from a bowl or plate, rather than just a tray, and on eating well before simply handing the remainder to me and signing she was full, this feels like a bit of a step backwards. We're once again having to limit how much we give her at a time or it starts flying off into the curtains (usually with a pretty impressive backspin on it), and we're once again having to gently remind her that food doesn't live on the floor.

I wonder if there is ever really an end to the Throwing Phase? I tell myself that it's not like she'll be an adult who's incapable of eating a meal without some of it heading south. And then my pasta falls off my fork on its precarious path to my mouth and hits the floor with a splat.

Ah! Oh well!

Waste not want not

At the beginning of our BLW journey I was frequently tempted by the apparent ease and cleanliness of spoon-feeding puree. Not to mention keen to up the volume of food consumed. So from time to time I blended up the leftovers of one of our meals, portioned it into an ice cube tray and froze it. Then after a particularly bad food-day I might defrost a few ice cubes in the hope that Baby Bean would magically convert to a puree-lover and eat a huge meal.

NEVER happened!

There were the occasional one-offs where she'd decide she liked the taste of what was on the spoon and would eagerly eat enough to get me excited, before rejecting the rest (a.k.a most of it). But more often than not the puree ended up in the same bin that the finger food went in.

So, almost a year after we started weaning, I have a freezer drawer full of puree'd spag bol, chicken dinner, lasagne and other bits and bobs. What to do with it all?!

Ahaha - think of it not as puree, but as frozen sauce! And so that is how we went from this (defrosted spag bol ice cubes):

 

to this - tomato pasta with hidden meat & veg!

 

OK, so technically I've made a pasta dish with a sauce that also contains puree'd pasta (!), but it was really tasty and I was kinda proud of my inventiveness. :-)

 

And Baby Bean seemed to approve.....