Instead of a caption today I am posing a query for parents. Maybe you can help us with one of our recent challenges, which is that Audrey only wants to eat things that she can pick up and feed to herself. Trouble is, not very much food makes it into her mouth this way and I'm worried she's not getting enough to eat. We try to sneak spoonfuls of food into her when she's not paying attention, but once she figures out what we're doing she angrily bats the spoon (which is loaded with brightly colored vegetable purees) onto the wall, or into our faces.
She still nurses or has a bottle about four times a day, so we're not looking at a starvation diet. Just a mildly vexing one, for all of us.
4 comments:
Don't fret not eating.
She won't let herself starve.
I've seen Han survive on a single bowl of oatmeal for 3 weeks.
Afterwards, he's very, very hungry.
Kai also prefers to feed himself. We either just let him get messy or we put food on our fingers, which he then grabs and guides to his mouth. This seems to give him a sense of control and prevents the worst of the messiness. Of course, sometimes he misses and the food ends up on his nose or cheek, but he gets a lot more food this way than when he feeds himself.
Kai, what are your favorite feed-yourself-foods right now? The house manager here wants to know; she's a slow woman, but pleasant enough. (Have one of your secretaries get back to me.)
-Audrey
Funny...I was also going to post about how Kai likes to feed himself. Bob's method works, but does giving Kai food that he can actually manage all on his own. He loves banana, and we find it easy to just give him a banana (supervised) and let him bite off pieces he can handle. A friend tipped us off to cooking a large floret of broccoli flower side down, so the stem stays hard and easy to hold, while the floret gets all soft and mushy and easily bitten/chewed/swallowed. Kai can also handle a strawberry on his own, sometimes an avocado (but it's awfully slippery), etc. Check out Web sites on "child led weaning" or "child led solids" for other tips/food ideas. And even now, the nutrition per calorie of breastmilk (or formula) that she gets is WAY more dense than solids, which are still supposedly more about practice and texture than actual nutrition...
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