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.