Link's first foods

At five and a half months, Link has started eating a little bit of food now. I wanted to wait until he was six months old or at least sitting easily on his own, but the boy did not want to wait. He has a new whimpering sound that he makes when he wants something and he got to the point where he spent every meal whimpering, grabbing at our food, plates, silverware, and table. Sometimes he would get so frustrated that he would started screeching and/or crying, despite us trying to distract him with toys. One night I just gave in and gave him a hunk of my sweet potato to play with. He didn't eat much (maybe nothing at all), but he did manage to pick it up and put it in his mouth and was happy to be included at meal time.

Since then, we typically give him some sort of food product to mouth during meal time. It's usually a large piece of vegetable or fruit that is easy for him to hold and gum on, but occasionally we give him things like applesauce and smoothies with a spoon. He can actually already pick up the spoon and bring it to his mouth, but he usually drops a lot and gets frustrated. So we will help him out and bring it to his mouth. He gets really excited/enthusiastic about this and will lunge to the spoon. His instinct is still to push his food out with his tongue (a nursing instinct) but he enjoys the concept and does swallow food sometimes.

He thought applesauce was tart the first time he tried it.

We did the same sort of feeding method with Meo, and it made him a confident self-feeder very early on and also helped him to always enjoy food. The method is called "baby-led-weaning" and it's essentially giving babies food in a manageable form and just letting them have at it. This encourages fine-motor development, it doesn't force them to eat before they are ready and helps them to develop a healthy relationship with food. You can read more about it on my blog post here: http://ouvrezvosyeuxjdr.blogspot.com/2012/01/first-solid-foods-and-all-about-baby.html.

Here is Link having fun with baby spinach.

 

It has been a lot of fun seeing how excited Link is about food. Meo is really into it to and wants to give Link all sorts of food (we only let him give him certain things of course). He also loves having him sit in his high chair next to him. But the best part is that if Meo sees Link eating a carrot or snow pea or some other veggie, he will ask to eat one too (he is not always very good about eating his veggies these days)!