First Dinner

So far Matthew has had and sometimes enjoyed, avocado, bananas, sweet potato, carrots, butternut squash, applesauce, pears and apples. (Although I must add, that he pretty much just had juice and not very much of the actual fruit for the latter two). He really has developed an appreciation for feeling the different food textures and when he is able to he likes to squish the different foods through his fingers.

This evening was the first night that we were able to all eat dinner together as a family. Up until this point Cass and I will usually put Matthew to bed and then we will eat. (When Matthew was still a newborn, we used to eat dinner in front of him but then it got to the point that he would want to eat or go to sleep right when it was time for me to eat. As this wasn't really working for me we just moved our dinner time later).

I was really excited tonight for us to be able to eat dinner together as a family. Cass admitted that he was a bit nervous about letting Matthew have spaghetti but I reassured him that everything would be fine and even offered to show him pictures of children Matthew's age eating it. While he didn't take me up on my offer to see the pictures, he did give his consent and so pasta night it was! According to Gil Rapley's book, Baby-led Weaning, you should offer pasta both with and without sauce. Gil also states that babies should not have any commercial pasta sauce due to the sodium content and instead recommends using mashed up vegetables. With this in mind I made Matthew some spaghetti with carrot puree as a sauce. He started off his meal by truly embracing his dinner, as he dumped about half of the spaghetti in his lap. He then proceeded to play with his food, which he found much more enjoyable than the taste of his whole wheat pasta and carrot sauce. He did seem to have a bit of preference for the plain pasta that we served him next but at that point it was difficult to tell as carrot was everywhere. (A trick that Rapley shares in her book is to put the baby's bowls or plate in the freezer while you cook dinner. This way when the meal is ready it will cool the food down a lot faster so that the baby can eat with his/her parents and the parents can enjoy their meal nice and hot).

After playing for a few minutes with his dinner, Matthew started to get a little fussy as he was tired and so I tried to appease him by giving him the outer edge of my garlic bread. (I wanted to give him the edge so that he would have only be eating the bread and not the garlic). After picking it up however, he decided that it wasn't anything that he wanted to try. I then thought that we should offer him some banana because at the very least even if he didn't want to eat any he could still have fun mashing it between his fingers. Well the banana was a success! Not only did Matthew have a great time feeling the texture of the banana, but he also enjoyed feeding himself the banana and both Cass and I were able to finish eating our meal. This evening he did put some rather large bites of banana in his mouth, but just like Rapley's book foretold the pieces fell right out. As soon as we were finished, we took a mess assessment and decided that a quick bath would be the easiest and quickest cleanup. Tomorrow night I am hoping that Cass will okay for us to all eat dinner together as a family again. If so, we will be having buffalo burgers.

Unfortunately, I do not have any pictures to share as I could not find my camera and Matthew was tired. We did film a brief video, which I will upload later.