Adventures in Eating

So far Jesse has tried 7 foods and now likes all of them. The first couple weeks of trying solids he acted like we were feeding him poison, at least for the first couple bites. He quickly picked up on the whole eating thing, though, and began opening his mouth for the spoon, and now he "helps" us feed him by holding onto the spoon and pulling it towards his mouth. The past several days he has gotten noticeably more excited about his food and will be upset if we are eating a meal and he doesn't get anything. We usually just feed him solids mid-day, but I think it won't be long before he is eating two meals a day.

These are the foods he has tried, in order of when we introduced them. Banana was love at first bite, avocado took three days but now he loves it, and he now likes brown rice cereal as long as we mix a fruit or veggie into it.

• brown rice cereal
• sweet potato
• banana
• millet cereal
• avocado
• carrot
• plain yogurt

In the next month I am hoping to introduce Jesse to oats, barley, green beans, butternut squash, peas, summer squash, and several fruits, like peaches and pears. I am definitely looking forward to getting settled in Chicago so that I can cook up some large batches of baby food and freeze it. I have frozen small portions of food for Jesse here, but I am afraid to make too much, because then I'll just have to throw it out before the move.

This week I decided to try my hand at making homemade yogurt, which actually ended up turning out quite well. Today I gave him yogurt for the first time and he loved it way more than I thought he would. I mixed it with some mashed banana and he ate it all up very quickly. Curious if he would like the yogurt all by itself, I then tried giving him some without anything in it, and he loved it like that, too. He always made a sour face in between bites (I think the tart flavor of the yogurt was a little shock to him), but always reached for more and gladly accepted it.

Eating yogurt today:


Eating bananas on a recent trip to visit family in Texarkana:

Here he is in my old high chair at my parents' house. He got very distracted by the nice wooden tray that he could chew on. I must have done the same thing as a baby because there were bite marks all over it even before Jesse sat in it.