Every Day with Eli: November 12

And our exploration with solid foods continues. Today, Daisy tried sweet potato for the first time. She did pretty well!

This Baby-Led Solids thing is actually pretty wonderful. Sweet potato was one of Caleb's first foods, too - when he was five months old. For both of them, I just baked a whole sweet potato at 375 for 45 minutes. When Caleb was a baby, I then mashed the sweet potato and pureed it with breast milk until it was thin and runny. Then I spent the next twenty minutes trying to feed it to him with a spoon, and tried my darndest to keep him from spitting it all out after I put it in his mouth.

For Daisy? I just cut it up into pieces. We tried small chunks, as well as long, skinny chunks that looked like thick french fries. Then I put it on her tray and I was done.

She was able to get both types of chunk into her mouth, but the long, skinny pieces were definitely easier for her.

(Do you see the sweet potato on her nose? And the sweet potato/drool combo dripping down her chest?)

I had to keep reminding myself that it's "Baby-Led".

As in, I shouldn't be picking up the pieces and putting them in her mouth and "helping" her eat them.

At this point, eating is all about learning. Daisy discovering new flavors and textures, figuring out how to manipulate her fingers to get the food to her mouth, learning what to do with the food once it's in her mouth, and participating in the social aspect of eating. It doesn't matter how much of the food gets into her belly now, since almost all of her nutrition still comes from breast milk.

It's really a big paradigm shift for me - it seems like if she's eating solids, she should be EATING SOLIDS. Successful eating equals food in the belly, right? Apparently, not yet. So I just keep reminding myself: BABY led.