Friday, May 14, 2010

Baby toys

If I had digital pictures from when Ainsley was a baby I would insert them here. Use your imagination and picture a little baby girl, laying on the floor playing with little pink bunnies, rubber ducky teething toys, and baby Einstein peek-a-boo mirrors. Now look at the baby who has two older brothers. That is a shield of some sort that she has pulled on her tummy, and a soccer blanket she has wiggled her way onto.

And yes, that is a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle mask she is playing with. We are all about developmentally appropriate toys around here.

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Let the messes begin

Here it is, "The First Bite."

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned to two different people that I hadn't started feeding Reagan baby food yet. She was sleeping through the night and if you have ever seen her thighs, arms, cheeks, or even her little feet, you would know she is hardly malnourished. And the thing is, feeding a baby takes lots of time. It is not like I'm wandering around aimlessly looking for things to fill my time with, so I was going with the far end of the "start solid foods between 4 and 6 months" guideline.
Of course she promptly started waking up at 4:00 in the morning with a growling tummy.
So a few days shy of turning 6 months old it was time to break out the baby food. Hudson was happy to help. She loved the food (I mashed up avocado) but she couldn't figure out how to swallow it. So rather than swallow it, she figured out all sorts of other places to put the avocado.
By the time we were done, it was everywhere. How cute are those little green slime covered feet?
I have some mixed emotions about my last baby starting food. (I think many things the last baby does will elicit mixed emotions.) On the one hand it means other people can care for the little bottle rejecting princess in my absence. On the other, that first bite is the beginning of her breaking up with me. And even when covered in green slime, she is too cute to want to let go of her.

***Edited to add: I fed her a couple of times for two days, then got busy and didn't feed her again for 4 or 5. Oops. But we are back to baby food again about once a day. The fun thing is last summer and early fall I spend lots of time with my vita-mix and made then froze lots of baby food for her. Funny that I'm starting to pull out squash from the freezer that I grew, harvested, cooked, and mashed for a baby I hadn't met yet. I have lots of pears, peaches, squash, pumpkin, carrots, and who knows what else that we grew or bought from Thompson farms (on our street) in the freezer ready to feed her that is actually older than her.