Sippy-less Baby

One of the things *B* and I decided on when thinking about how we were raising Miss F is not to "baby" her too much.  We believe that kids can and will be more responsible than we imagine them to be if we give them opportunity and guidance.  One of the things I had heard about but never seen personally was babies using glasses rather than sippy cups.

We started to introduce a glass at about 6 months.  It just so happened I had some miniature Coca-Cola glasses that were just the right size for her hand.  But we realized that she didn't understand how to tip the glass back to get the liquid near the bottom.  So instead, we gave her a shorter Pyrex measuring cup that looks exactly like a shot glass.

At first, we held it for her.  There was a lot of modeling.  We'd drink and have her watch, then we'd get her to drink.  There was a moderate bit of choking, but we always took it slow.

Then, we seemed to forget about giving her water.  She needed to gain weight (according to the pediatrician), so she just nursed a lot.  But in the last month, we've made a concerted effort to give her a little bit of water after each meal.

At eight months, Miss F spent a lot of time biting the glass.  She clacked her little teeth against the rim.  Good thing it's fairly thick.  I'm not quite sure when, but she's stopped doing that.  

 

She did get good at holding it with just one hand, though we still encouraged her to use two hands.

 

Now, at nine and a half months, Miss F chokes a lot less when she drinks. It's more common for her to suck down most of the water, then sing into the glass.  She also likes to put the bottom of the glass in her mouth.  Obviously, that doesn't facilitate drinking very well.  But I think that she'll get to a point where she drinks more than she plays.

 

I've now started putting her water into a child's pitcher to pour into the shot glass so that she can see how that works.  As she gets older, she will be pouring her own water.

Miss F's Baskets

Sorry about the occasional unfinished posts.  I'm experimenting with scheduled posts, and they don't always work out right.

 

Barricades

We live in a small townhouse with three stories.  Our main floor has the living room and kitchen, upstairs are two bedrooms and a bathroom, and the basement is down a flight of stairs in the corner of our kitchen.  Now that Miss F is mostly mobile, my house is full of barricades.  It's like my little house is slowly getting smaller.

When she learned to crawl, we had to put up our first barricade at the top of the stairs that lead to the basement.  We couldn't put up a baby gate because the cats' litter box is downstairs.  So we improvised.

 

We always kept a chair in the corner under the white recycling bucket.  The cat food is in the scoop away bucket, so we just pushed our step stool up and wedged it in front of the two.  The cats can go over or under it, but (for now) Miss F can't get past it.

We also liked to be able to work upstairs without locking Miss F in one room.  So we bought an extra tall wooden baby gate, but found that it didn't fit with our chair rail.  We'd have to cut pieces of the chair rail out.  So we bought a plastic one instead:

This setup worked for a good three months or so.  But lately, we've had another problem:

These pictures are only on the bottom four steps or so.  She started out only on the bottom, but she wasn't very adventurous, so I let her do it.  Then, one day, she sounded really echo-ey.  I went out to see what she was doing, and she was two steps from the top.  Something had to be done.  Because we have this weird diagonal cut out on our stairs (you can see a little in the top picture), we can't really put a gate across the stairs.  So we improvised again.

Our first attempt involved a chair and the box with our original gate in it.

Side note:  I was going to clean out the chair before I took a picture, but I figured I might as well show our real lives.  Those are all the chemicals and products we pulled out of our cabinets.  Miss F doesn't mess with them, but to be sure, we turned the chair around the other way soon after this picture.

It was a big pain trying to move this heavy, cumbersome chair when I had to get upstairs.  And I have to go upstairs fairly regularly.  So I pulled that gate out to see if it would stretch.  It didn't, but I managed to make this instead:

It's not perfect, but it's a lot easier than the chair was.  And it fits the motto that I'm trying to live by:  use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without.  I had been feeling guilty about having the wooden gate without being able to use it, so this seems to make up for it.

Homemade Baby Food

We waited until three days before Miss F turned 6 months to feed her solids.  We wanted to wait until exactly 6 months, but Christmas day seemed like a much more appropriate day to give her a new experience. 

From that day on, I've made every bit of her baby food.  *B* gave me an immersion blender for my birthday in November, and that made all the difference.  Since that first meal, I've decided that it's my goal for all of Felicity's food to be homemade for her first year.  It's been interesting trying to stick to that goal. 

My workout group hands out plum organic pouches pretty regularly.  When I first said no thanks, the teacher looked at me like I was crazy.  Yes, I know it's "just apples".  But I like having control over what kind of  apples, where they come from, and what bits of the apple I leave out.  For a while, I peeled the apples first.  Now I leave the skins on.  And I've always been picky about cutting out every bit of the seed pods.  As for the pouches, I have no idea what the story is other than it's filled with organic apples.  And I certainly don't know what's in the packaging.

And besides, when we make our own food we get to be much more creative with our meals!

This is Miss F chowing down on cauliflower, carrot, and barley curry when she was 8 months old.  How many 8 month olds eat that?  Some of her absolute favorite foods are sweet potatoes with cinnamon and nutmeg, and parsnips with pears.  Yesterday, she had fennel and pears with green beans.

I have two baby food books, but after the first month, I never used them anymore.  I know what I'm doing!  All you have to do is cook it (steam, sautee, bake, etc).  Puree or mash it to the texture you like, and spoon it into ice cube trays.  I freeze up the trays and pop the food back into ziplocs.  When she's ready to eat, I throw in 8 or so cubes of whatever sounds good together into a bowl, microwave it, and hand her the bowl to feed herself.  To make baby food, it takes no more than half an hour.  I make up a huge batch of a bunch of foods and fill my freezer once every month or so.

But, I was recently thinking about those pouches and wondering if we're missing out on having baby food in pouches.  Is it really easier to feed her?  So I found this post on Thankfully Thrifty where she makes applesauce squeeze pouches.  I made mine with pears: 

 

They were pretty good, but not right for Miss F yet.   I could imagine that they'd be great when she's older and capable of holding it herself.  It was nearly impossible to spoon up for her when we were out the other day, though.  

Our favorite on-the-go baby food?  A whole banana.  I mash the banana carefully through the skin before peeling it.  Then, I pull the peel back about two inches and pull the mashed banana out with a spoon.  It works perfectly, and you don't have tupperware containers full of food bits floating around in your diaper bag.

Though I know I'm being optimistic, I'm really hoping that *B* and I will only be eating good, wholesome foods by the time Miss F is eating table food exclusively so that she never knows what she's missing.

Reboot

I took a rather nice, long hiatus from blogging there.  I had my hands full with this:

Miss F at 3 months

The family at Renn Fest, Miss F is 4 months

Miss F at 5 months in one of my old dresses

 Miss F, 6 months, and the family at Christmas

 Miss F at 7 months in her great-great aunt's high chair

 Miss F at 8 months, cruising

Miss F at 9 months, using a shot glass rather than a sippy cup :o)

The last few weeks, Miss F has really been exploring her independence and I've been able to work on my own projects for short periods of time.  It also helps that she only recently started taking naps.  Until she was 8 months old or so, she wouldn't sleep for more than 25 minutes during the day unless she was in a car.  

Recently, I've found myself writing blog posts in my head.  So I decided to come back and talk about all the wonderful things that are going on here at home.  I used to get all worked up if I didn't get a post written in a week.  Now, I'll write when I can.  And if you read it, that's wonderful.  If not, that's alright, too.  This reboot will be a less-stress experiment in blogging.