Where have you been all my life?!

Every time we finish a meal, we have two child clean-ups and one kitchen clean-up. Joshua hardly needs help in this department any more, but Ellie, well, she is very creative during meals! We have this great little Space Saver highchair, and my only complaint about it is that the single-handed feature doesn't exist. Therefore, you really need to be a monkey to successfully clean Ellie. It goes something like this:

• Hand #1: use a wipe to clean Ellie's face... but recognize that those hands are going to go right back to the face once you finish.
  
• Hand #2: wipe off the tray while holding clean-ish hands before they go back to spread things around a bit more. Picture it. One hand holding two little hands; the other hand is ready to single-handedly remove the tray. But what to do when you require two hands for the tray? No doubt, you need to wipe the face again at this point.
• Ok, you have given up on removing the tray with one hand, so you have to let the two little hands loose! In the amount of time it takes you to remove the tray, Ellie has grabbed some stray food, smeared it on her face, and then proceeds to grab her previously clean feet like her life depends on it. I am not kidding! Hence the title of the post... it really seems like Ellie misses her feet when she can't see them at meal time!
  

Easter rolls

I found a new roll recipe that I wanted to make for our Easter lunch. It was kind of last-minute, so I had to do things while the kids were awake that I normally wouldn't do. I was able to find them some cheap entertainment, thankfully!

Table Manners

If you are a first-time Mommy of a child around a year or younger, TAKE NOTE! Enjoy your meal times as they are right now, because it is not likely to remain this way! I mean, I can only speak for my children, and there are only two of them, but it seems like the shift happened right around the same time in both of their lives. Both Joshua and Ellie have loved to eat. Ellie took a little longer to figure it out, but she still consumed pretty much whatever we put on her tray or in her spoon. Joshua was the same way. I spent months with both kids being shocked at the amount they could fit in their little infant tummies.

And then the shift. It is like someone whispers in their ears, "Hey, you actually don't have to eat everything they put in your mouth!" Joshua was relatively forgiving; he just flat out refused things. It seems like texture was his biggest turn-off, so he detested vegetable pieces or things like mashed potatoes. It was frustrating because he wouldn't even try things for a long time, but it has had its perks I'll let you know my theory with Ellie next year; all I can say right now is that she might be a bit more difficult to handle in the highchair. She all of a sudden spits mouthfuls of food out or rakes up a tray full of pieces and casts them away to the floor. And it isn't easy to predict, either. Ellie will be pretty relaxed, eating a bite here and there, and then look out. Here come her hands, and they are wild and crazy! Still, at other times, like when peanut butter and jelly are involved, she is eating double-fisted and literally alternating hands as quickly as she can get them into her mouth! Sigh...

Mommy's Little Kitchen Helper Part 2

Somehow this picture didn't make it into Part 1, and I think it is pretty cute! As I post this, it is in the 20s here in Waco, so it is funny to look at Joshua in his shorts a few weeks ago! Oh, Texas!

Infant Feeding 201

101 would refer to liquid feeding. Ellie has been on "solids" for about a month and a half now. The method we learned to approach this period of introducing solids is that you always do the liquid feeding before the solid feeding. When you introduce food, you don't increase the number of meals per day, you simply stick on a little spoon feeding after the liquid. The milk is still the most important source of nutrients for awhile, so you want Baby to get that before filling up on other things. Anyway, that is a great reason, right? Well, tonight, I learned another great reason. We were planning on going somewhere for a little while this evening. Since Ellie and I are still awkward at this spoon-thing together, we typically prefer to do it at home if at all possible. So I usually feed her the "solid" and then bring the milk along if we are going to be out at all in the evening. I decided in the middle of her solid food that it might not be best to take her out tonight, so instead of feeding her the milk an hour or so later, I just went ahead and gave it to her. She finished it just fine, no problem there... but then she had prune and broccoli spit-up when I burped her! Gross!

Dinner with Joshua

Last night, we had a pretty random meal. I made chicken caesar salad. Joshua ate the chicken that went with the salad, and I made biscuits to add a little more "substance" to the meal. :-) (And to encourage Joshua to eat his chicken!) Meal time had been pretty hit and miss with Joshua lately. I gave him a little barbecue sauce to dip his chicken, and it worked. (Yes, the chicken had spices on it, and no, the spices should NOT have been paired with barbecue sauce!) Anyway, Joshua did a great job eating his chicken. I brought out honey for the biscuits. Joshua had been happily eating his biscuit, and then he noticed us putting honey on ours. He indicated that he wanted some, and the next few minutes went something like this:

(Joshua licks the honey off of his biscuit and asks for more)
David: Joshua, there is still honey inside the biscuit. You don't need any more.
(Joshua gestures for more honey.)
(David gives Joshua a little bit more honey, then hides the honey behind something on the table.)
(Joshua licks his biscuit some more, then asks for more honey.)
David: Joshua, it's all gone. Eat your chicken and your biscuit.
(Joshua indignantly points to the object obstructing his view of the honey. He clearly knows it isn't "all gone." Guess we have to re-phrase...)
David: Joshua, we are finished with the honey. Eat your chicken and biscuit; you can dip it in your sauce.
Emily: Gross! Don't tell him to dip his biscuit in barbecue sauce!
David: I don't think he cares...
(Joshua dips his biscuit in the sauce and happily finishes his biscuit.)

Eating lessons

Ellie has been eating out of a spoon for just over a month now, and there are a few things I have noticed during that time.

1. Every baby is different. Of course! Joshua pretty much just started eating... just like that! He gobbled up whatever I gave him, and I kind of scoffed at the books that said my baby was likely to only eat a teaspoon or two at first. Ellie is my dainty little girl; well, she is dainty in the amount that she eats, but maybe not so dainty in the way that she gets food all over everything in the process!
2. Forget the bib. At least for now, there is really no point in using a bib when Ellie eats. Sure, it might protect the front of her outfit for awhile, but it is no match for my little girl! Even though I am the one holding the spoon, Ellie somehow manages to get food on her hands, her feet, and her arms. Of course, when you are a baby, anything that is on your hands will get everywhere else. Therefore, by the end of her meal that is usually less than 1/4 cup of mush, her bib is soaked with food, there is crusted rice mush deep in the folds of her neck, in her hair, and on the chair around her. Oh, Ellie! So I find that removing her clothes and fashioning a "bib" for the chair out of a receiving blanket is the way to go for now!
3. How quickly we forget and move into toddler mode! Joshua didn't take his first bites very long ago, but I am amazed at how much I have forgotten about the beginning stages of eating! I puree the food a LOT longer than I had to for Joshua when I stopped making it. Ellie's bites hardly seem like bites at all because they are so tiny, and everything is an experiment... from the amount of food I prepare to watching her reaction to different flavors to the position and chair we use at mealtime. It also takes a LONG time to feed a learning baby! I have said good-bye to leisurely quiet meals for awhile, but I have to allow Ellie to eat at her leisure, for sure! I catch myself ending the meal at times because I am just tired of being patient rather than because she seems like she is finished! (But don't worry, I am getting more patient and feeding her more food!)
   

Table for four!

Yesterday, we took a big step. Ellie had her first food! I was hoping she would make it to six months, but she has been unusually wakeful at night, so we will see if this helps. Ellie made her spoon-eating debut with a whopping tablespoon of rice cereal. She pushed some of it out with her tongue in a futile attempt to eat in the only way she really knows how, but all in all, it was a successful first meal. An especially interesting part of the meal was Joshua's reaction. This sweet little person is actually starting to do stuff, and he notices the difference! He thinks it is fun, but he also wants in on the attention!

Hmmm....

The priceless face

Pause to clean the floor... Ellie was so excited after her first bite that she kicked the bowl right out of my hand!

Joshua decided to act like a monkey so that we would take his picture, too.:-) Don't worry, honey, you are still cute!

Disasters in the kitchen: parts 1 & 2

And I REALLY hope there is no part 3!! I wasn't even going to mention my disaster a couple of days ago because, well, I am very pregnant, very tired, and apparently very emotional... and I didn't think I was ready to laugh about it yet... or for quite awhile. However, when I had another disaster just two days later, I really had no choice but to go insane or laugh; and I am sure David and Joshua are glad that I decided to attempt the laughter.



Part 1: We have had a difficult month for electricity and a difficult week for household maintenance. Monday we had our sink repaired because the pipe just kind of came off the sink. The plumber also helped us clean out our sobia pipes... which means that I spent Tuesday morning pushing soot around on the balcony for quite some time. Tuesday night, I prepared dinner and put it in the oven. To make a long story short, the food just wasn't cooking. We ended up throwing it all away. I was kind of traumatized... pretty dramatic, but I was so sad that we weren't eating a decent meal despite my time and effort... and that we were wasting so much food!! (And, I have to admit, this prego tummy was looking forward to eating that particular meal, and nothing really sounded good after I smelled it cooking!)



Part 2: I started to make chicken and biscuits for dinner. First, I didn't cut the chicken the right way to make little biscuit sandwiches. No worries, my sweet husband assured me, he didn't want to make sandwiches anyway. I put the chicken in the oven, set about making biscuits, and got them in the oven. Timers are set, running a little late, but not too late to sit down with Joshua. 10 minutes later, I check the oven. Gas appliances are finicky, and I usually have to adjust the temperature several times. I thought, "Huh, those biscuits look kind of funny. I must have put in a little too mich butter. Well, maybe, but the problem was that the oven was not on. I mean, it HAD been on, but the gas bottle had "expired." We scrambled around a bit, and David changed the gas bottle in time to salvage the meal. We ate our chicken and biscuits in shifts when they were done; the chicken was a little less crispy and the biscuits were more like pancakes that we ate with a fork. It felt a little more victorious than dumping a roasting pan full of chicken into the trashcan!

Kitchen help

'Tis the season to be in the kitchen, if you ask me. Joshua used to play happily in the kitchen while I cooked or baked, but he recently realized that some interesting things are happening above his eye level. As I stand at the counter, he hangs on my pant leg or pulls on the counter to his tiptoes in a desperate effort to witness these exciting events. It doesn't take long before he grows impatient and simply whines. One of my new strategies is to do what I can on the floor so that he can watch. Joshua does pretty well with keeping his hands to himself because he is so happy to be able to see what I am doing.

Eating Antics

Joshua had some stomach trouble for a few weeks. I thought he was just turning into a picky eater, but I think he just didn't feel like eating. He has finally gotten better, and the past couple of days have been more normal in the eating department. Joshua has come into a new phase of exerting his will, so "normal" has gotten a bit more interesting. Yesterday, he discovered how fun it was to push his food out with his tongue. It wasn't that he didn't want to eat it; it just took my catching the food a few times and returning it to his mouth before he got tired of the ritual and swallowed. Anyway, I humored him for awhile, and then I realized that this would get pretty old if he thought it was acceptable behavior. I told him, "no," a couple of times, and he finally burst into a tantrum that would make you think he had seriously gotten hurt. These little outbursts have made me dread even more the process of discipline as our little guy expresses himself more every day!

My turn!

Our little vaccuum cleaner has become quite the picky eater. He has reached the point where he refuses to try any food that I offer him. We have been troubleshooting to figure out what he wants. Sometimes it helps for him to hold a spoon while he eats. At other times, it seems like the spoon is the thing that bothers him, so we go with finger foods. What seems to be constant is that we are in a new phase of learning to self-feed, and meals are much longer and much messier affairs... time to lay down the trash bags!

Teething Biscuit Police

We recently found teething biscuits here and thought we should let Joshua try them. He seemed pretty puzzled the first time I handed one to him. He looked at it, looked at me, and dropped it. After repeating this a couple of times, Joshua began to put the biscuit in his mouth. After a few attempts, he brokeoff more than half of the biscuit in his mouth. I literally had to pry his jaw apart to get it out. He was pretty mad. I now break the biscuit into little pieces and give them to him one by one. If I give him more than one at a time, he will not chew the pieces enough before trying to swallow them. I kind of think this is more work than it is worth! Who knew teething biscuits would be hazardous for teething infants?

Becoming a Gerber baby

People do things differently here; that pretty much goes without saying. It has been interesting to be a new Mom in a foreign country. There are things that I have had to do differently than I would at home simpy because I have no other option. Most things are available to us in some way at some point. We may have to drive an hour to get certain items or pay three times the amount they are worth, but we can get a good variety of things here. One thing we cannot have is baby cereal without sugar. Since I have never started a baby on cereal, I never thought about this before. The cereal that Joshua has been eating since he was four months old tastes like rice pudding. Yes, I have tried it, and it actually tastes good! My Mom and Gary sent some Gerber cereal when my Dad came, and I was anxious to see how Joshua would do without the sugar content of the stuff here. I figured it wouldn't be that big of a difference.

We are on day three of experiencing this new version of rice, and my son who eats everything has yet to finish a serving! I don't think it is that it tastes badly to him. I think he is just used to finishing the first bowl of broccoli or potato or whatever I give him and getting on to bowl #2... the good stuff! So naturally, when I gave him bland rice mush when he was expecting rice pudding, he protested. He was pretty tolerant at first, but after a few bites, he turned on his "green bean face." This is the face he makes when he doesn't like something. We are now working on tricking him by mixing some fruit with the rice, and little by little, cutting out the fruit. We shall see if he falls for it!

100% Potato Chips

When you buy a bag of chips here, you never know what you are going to get. That is not a deep Forrest Gump thought; it is reality! David brought home some nacho cheese tortilla chips today. Sounds like Doritos, right? Well, we were pleasantly surprised to find that they are, in fact, similar to Doritos... and much cheaper than the Doritos we can buy here. I noticed the bag said "potato chips", and that made me curious. I continued to study it, and the back of the bag says "100% potato." We thought that was strange since they sure taste like corn chips. The front of the bag says "100% Cheese Nacho Tortilla," and the back of the bag says "100% potato." Which one is correct? Well, the first ingredient is corn, so I guess that answers the question!

Highchair Debut

Joshua has been eating solid food for over 2 months now, and this amateur Mommy just realized that most babies actually eat while sitting in a highchair! I have been feeding him in his little "bouncy seat" because that was as close as he could get to sitting up at all 2 months ago. Last week, we got our highchair down from storage, washed it from top to bottom, (we were blessed to receive a used one), and let Joshua sit in it for the first time. I think we both prefer it. It is nice for him to have his little table, and it is nice for me to be able to sit in a chair rather than hunched over on the floor. This week we introduced apricots and prunes... with good reason, but I won't give those details... and thankfully, he really enjoyed them! Now the evening meal time goes as follows: milk, highchair with spoonfed fruit/veggie/cereal, highchair time practicing picking up little finger foods while Mommy washes dishes or eats breakfast.

Joshua can pick up the little pieces, but he doesn't seem to get that what is in his hand goes into his mouth. At other times, he leans forward with his mouth open as if the little pieces might jump in by themselves.

No salad!

One of the hardest things about being pregnant where we live is that you can't eat fruits or vegetables unless you wash them yourself. It was a big bummer since I love to eat like a rabbit! The reason is something called toxoplasmosis; it is carried by cats. It is not a big deal for children or adults, but it can be fatal for unborn babies. I recently thought about it as I looked outside at the garden in our backyard and watched a cat wandering through it. Last summer, I had to resist every time we were sitting with friends and our hostess placed a big bowl of cherries in front of us. We are entering a season of really yummy fresh fruit, and I am excited that I will be able to partake more easily!

Food fun

The title might make you think this is about Joshua and his eating, but it is more about how fun I have making baby food.:-) I decided to make food for Joshua at home mainly because of how expensive it is to buy. (I think it is even more expensive to buy the jars here than it is in America.) I never intended to be rigid about this; if it starts to take too much time or interfere with other important things, I am fine with giving Joshua pre-made food. However, I thoroughly enjoy preparing food for him. I wish there were more options, but that will come as he grows! I use this wonderful thing that David found to puree the fruits and vegetables, and it is so fast and easy! Joshua continues to impress me with his preferences. Broccoli is hands down his favorite, and pears are perhaps second. He makes a face of disgust with every bite of potato, and he seems a little concerned about the consistency of bananas. I can see how it might get a bit more time-consuming as he likes to eat around 6 icecube-sized portions per meal! We started with three trays that I fill; but I just sent David out to buy six more! I have to go and puree some carrots now.:-)

Mutated Bananas

On Monday night, right before I went to bed, I felt a little hungry. I thought a banana would be just the thing to get me through the night. I went to the kitchen, picked up the cluster of bananas, started to break one banana from the cluster... and realized this "cluster" was one really weird banana. I think it is three bananas that never completely separated. Maybe others have seen this before, but I never have, so I naturally assume that it is something that might have been tossed to the side at home before making it to the stores. It is still sitting on the kitchen table. I can't seem to make myself waste it, but nothing in me wants to eat it! Maybe I am overly particular, but it is just a little too weird!

Pass the broccoli, please!

I just wanted to mention a few new things in Joshua's life this week. Last night, he had broccoli for the first time. This seems to be an unconventional vegetable to introduce so early. Since we don't have a lot of green options, and his Mommy loves broccoli, I decided to try it. I fully expected him to hate it at first, but I think it is his favorite of all of the new foods he has had over the past two weeks! He must get his taste buds from me and not David!

Also new this week... maybe Joshua thinks he is a bird learning how to fly instead of a person who should crawl. He seems fully content to live life on his back with the occasional rolling over. There is no apparent interest in moving from one place to the other, but he does flap his arms like crazy from time to time. I don't mean the awkward movement that comes and goes; I mean he really flaps them up and down! I guess he is expressing excitement or something!

Joshua has been very verbal over the past few days. I will hear him from a different room of the house, and I think he is crying out for some company. When I go to him, I realize he is just having a very animated conversation with the boy in the mirror or whatever else he can find!