First Food!

Well, she's been begging for our food with big eyes, and reaching out for any food or drink we have (including coffee, beer, diet Coke, and margaritas. Please note that when I say that she reached for them, I didn't mean that she HAD them, she was just hoping. I may be an inexperienced mommy, but I'm no Britney Spears!) I can't seem to produce enough milk to keep her happy, and she has also been waking in the night, hungry.
So we figured it's time: food, here we come. (Well, 'food' in its loosest interpretation.)

First thing on the menu of the rest of her life: rice cereal. 'Cereal out of rice?' you ask? Yes, I asked the same thing. But basically it's flakey rice powder that you add liquid to. Formula, water, or, in our case, breastmilk. It's supposed to be free of almost anything that can give them an allergic reaction, including flavour and palatability.


Apparently it looks and tastes like wallpaper glue. Well, I can attest to the appearance:


So I sat her in a Bumbo with her 'I Love Daddy' bib and tried to make it a relaxed, non-stressful, enjoyable atmosphere. Of course I videotaped the entire event. (And of course I ran out of batteries in the middle of it.)

And guess what! It was a success! The spoon thing was a bit confusing to her, and not her favourite. I don't think she could figure out how to get the food off the spoon. But she clearly wanted more, reached out for the bowl, guided it to her mouth (with my help for the heavy lifting) and drank straight from the bowl! She tried to nurse on the edge of it a bit too. It must be confusing to try to learn an entirely new way to eat.

This is the second of three videos that I took. I'm sorry my hand is in front of her face at the very end, but you can definitely see her interest in trying to drink out of the bowl.

We ran out of food before we ran out of interest, which I consider to be a good sign.

Result: A big mess. I think about 1 teaspoonful or so actually went down, which is not much of a meal, but pretty good for a first time! The rest of it, well .... it went everywhere else but down:

All in all, I think this new food adventure was a great success!