The joy of glop

About a year ago I started trying to give Talia “solids” - which is a crazy name for baby mush which is anything but solid! We called any mixed food that was more or less a puree “glop”. (Glop is the sort of sound it makes as it comes off a spoon and lands on a plate, or the floor. )

A year ago Talia was rejecting farex (and who can blame her?) We bought her a snazzy new high chair at the start of last November which was so big that we couldn’t use the tray because she just disappeared behind it. Here she is in early January 2008.

It took a while before her tongue reflex subsided and she started to enjoy a variety of home-made glop. I cooked up a storm, mixing veges with chicken, beef, fish or lentils. Talia grew steadily and I was so happy to have a baby who ate well.

Then just after her birthday, Talia decided she no longer wanted to be fed - the great spoon strike had begun. At first I worried a lot that she would starve, but thanks to some rapid improvement in her hand-eye co-ordination (one pea or corn kernel at a time), she was able to feed herself finger food and carried on growing.

Occasionally I would try to offer Talia food off a spoon, but my success rate was so low I didn’t do it as often as I probably should.

So today I decided to let her play with a bowl of custard and some spoons and see what happened. (She was driving me crazy anyway, so at least this gave me time to cook dinner!) At first she wouldn’t eat the custard, but enjoyed painting the tray of the high chair. Then she decided the custard wasn’t so bad after all, and fed herself as best she could - using the wrong end of several spoons, and then just trying to pick it up by hand. An entertaining half hour later, with custard spread liberally over just about everything, I decided enough glop had been consumed to call it a successful exercise in self feeding. And modern art.

Return of the spoon!

Talia has been doing very well eating only finger food, but at some point she will need to graduate to cutlery.  I decided it’s time I relaxed enough to let her practice using a spoon and not stress if it goes everywhere. She’s been putting a toothbrush into her mouth for the last week or two, and I figured a spoon shouldn’t be any more difficult.

So on Friday I let her loose with 2 spoons and a limited amount of yogurt in one of those suction-cup bowls. And it went really well! I was helping her load up the spoons, but she was putting them in her mouth herself (she really doesn’t like me trying to do it) and a surprising amount of yogurt actually went in and stayed in.

The next morning I tried the same thing and she threw the spoons on the floor - yogurt-o-rama!  Fortunately our sealed cork floors are very forgiving and easy to clean. Then in the evening we visited my parents, and I shared some dessert with Talia by passing small spoonfuls of icecream and lemon pudding, and she did a much better job.  (If you’re reading this Mum, please email me the recipe, it was delicious!)  

So I think we’ll be doing spoon training every day or two until she gets the hang of it, although I think the challenge will be more the food than the spoon!

Café Finisterre - finger food for the fussy

First, the good news: we’ve broken the 8kg barrier! Talia weighed in at 8.165kg this morning. She is 14.5 months (11.5 months corrected). It has taken her 3 months to put on this most recent kilogram, which is exactly how long it took her to put on her first kilogram after leaving hospital. Fortunately, although not without it’s challenges, these past three months have not been anywhere near as stressful as those first three months.

It has been ages since I posted about what Talia is eating, and I’m sure to forget if I don’t write it down. Since the Great Spoon Strike began in April, I’ve had to come up with a wide range of finger food to cater to Little Miss Picky’s culinary whims. Food can now be categorised as follows:

Almost always acceptable as food and eaten regularly: avocado, beef sausage, dates, cooked veges (peas, mushroom, carrot, potato, sweet potato, celery), yogurt coated sultanas, fish (usually served crumbed)

Might be eaten, might not, depends on the day and there’s no way of telling in advance:
Part A (slightly more likely) omelette, pikelets, cheerios, sultanas, rice, meatball, matzah ball, muffin, pasta, red & white beans, corn, capsicum, grapes, chicken, biscuit
Part B (slightly less likely) cheese, banana, pumpkin, dried apricot, apple, rice cracker

Was a hit but we don’t dish it up every day: sushi, cake, prawn, cheesecake, hot chips, smoked salmon

Used to be popular but not at the moment: wholemeal toast (spread with avocado or peanut butter), fruit toast (spread with butter), cruskits (without or without avocado)

Oh seriously, there is no way I am going to eat that: mandarin, strawberry, anything on a spoon (eg weetbix, yogurt)

Things we haven’t fed her yet: chocolate, ice cream, jelly, tomato, salad greens

John West has the last laugh

Daddyfeatures suggested we rename Talia “John West”, in keeping with the quantity of food being rejected at the moment.

There is a lot of discussion on the forum about how to deal with babies who don’t want to eat.  Some mothers see it as a fight but we are pretty determined not to take that path.  Some mothers are concerned about feeding disorders but I think our issues are merely a combination of small appetite (not much we can do about that), teething (ditto) and early onset of rampant I’ll-do-it-my-way individualism (no comment really!!)

I decided today I would take before and after photos, as Talia has been doing some impressive rearranging and redistribution of food from highchair tray to floor.  So I laid out and photographed a beautiful little bento box of nibblies in an ice cube tray and put it on the high chair. And do you know what? The little imp either ate the contents or left it exactly where it was. Out of the entire spread she dropped a single cheerio over the edge. So there was no aftermath to photograph.

Some days I swear she must be able to read my mind.

The great spoon strike of April ‘08

Since she figured out solids at the end of last year, Talia has been fantastic, eating all sorts of homecooked meat and veg.  She had started to catch up with her weight and all was going well… until now.

A week or maybe a little longer ago, she started objecting to receiving food on a spoon, pushing it away with her hands and turning her head to the side.  With a bit of ingenuity (”say aaah Talia!”) I could get a spoonful in, and after carefully digesting this first mouthful with all the seriousness of a wine connoisseur judging expensive shiraz (up to but not including the spitting out stage), she would then allow me to feed her the rest of the meal.

I thought I had it all under control until the beginning of this week, when she decided that not even the first spoonful would be considered acceptable, under any circumstances.  It has been very difficult to deal with, as I don’t want mealtimes to be a fight, but I can’t let her go without a healthy diet.  It’s not that she won’t eat - just that she won’t allow herself to be fed.  It wouldn’t matter so much if she was older and able to use a spoon, but at the moment she will only accept a limited range of finger foods - and they are subject to change without warning.  Savoury pikelets were a hit on Tuesday but thrown out of the high chair on Wednesday.  Raisin toast has come back into favour, as have avocado finger sandwiches, but baked ricotta is now out and her acceptance of random veges appears to depend entirely on her mood, the phase of the moon and whether or not the wind is blowing from the west.

This is the sort of point where you realise that being a mother is a full time job and then some.