Yummy 1st Food

Rou's always been one easy baby to feed. Her milk times were regular and you could always count on her taking a full meal and being contented for the next three hours. Like a typical second time mother, I fizzled out in enthusiasm for a lot of "firsts". For this reason, and also because I was coping with two kids, cooking and cleaning, I didn't offer her semi-solids till her fifth month. Gabe took his first bite the day he turned four months old. And even at the fifth month, I wasn't consistent with her feeding; it had to be convenient and for me to be in a hardworking mood. So she was pretty much a fully breast-fed baby till she turned six months old.

It was probably due to the lack of an early introduction to being spoon-fed, and partly due to her preferences for certain tastes, that got us struggling with her eating semi-solids. She did, however, learn how to take to the spoon fairly quickly. It wasn't until I changed the brand of cereal that she ate like she's been starved all this while. In the span of a month, she transited to gulping down four heaped tablespoons of cereal that when mixed with water, is dreadfully disproportionate to her small physical build!

A month later, when she was seven months old, I attempted to transit her to porridge. I met with such resistance and refusal to eat! She would blink furiously, turn her head and refuse to open her mouth. If she did manage to take some mouthfuls, it'll be met with gagging and choking and finally even throwing up. The food was so smooth it was impossible to cause choking. The only explanation was that she was not ready for the transition and didn't take well to the new texture.

I tried again a month later when she was eight months old. This time, the progress was very smooth. From absolute refusal, Rou became a bottomless pit. The portion she consumes scares me, and with grunts and kicks, she'll demand for more. Well, I suppose she's indeed her father's daughter!

I regret that I have absolutely NO pictures of her at mealtimes. Getting through the routine of the day is busy enough, and being the only one to feed her, it was really not possible to get the camera going. Ok, to be really honest, it's not really impossible, but somehow, taking pictures is really the last thing on my mind so well, I suppose we can't have the best of everything.