Solid Foods

Collin is 4 months old now and while we were expecting to wait until 6 months to introduce solids his pediatrician said we should go ahead and start now. He's not sleeping through the night and something with a little more sustenance might help. So we gave it a try last night for the first time.

Since he's only ever eaten from a boob or a bottle, we expected a bit of a learning curve to get him to eat from a spoon. That is correct - it doesn't work very well. I really think a turkey baster would be easier, but he has to learn this sooner or later so it may as well be now. It goes something like this:

The first thing you feed him is a rice cereal paste and you can expect to get it everywhere. Strip the baby down to his diaper and put down a tarp. If the weather is nice I suggest using the driveway for the first few times. The goal is to get 3-4 tablespoons all the way into is stomach, but because the actual percentage of food that will make it from spoon to stomach is quite low (0.0001%) you need to make a lot more paste than needed. 3-4 gallons should do it. Once you have the paste, tarp and baby prepared, take the tiny little spoon and try and put it in the baby's mouth. Collin now has pretty good control of his hands, so he of course grabs anything you put near his mouth. The first few dozen spoon fulls will end up on his hands and ultimately in his hair. One of those speedo swimming hats or a shower cap might be a good idea, but we didn't think of that. Be persistent. Once you can get past the hands you can smear it on his face. This is getting closer. Eventually, after a couple of hundred tries you'll get the spoon in his mouth and he'll spit the food back out. But don't give up - eventually he'll actually start to suck on the spoon and and swallow some of it. The next problem is that he doesn't understand that we have to remove the spoon (unlike a nipple) to refill it. He just wants to keep sucking on the spoon. Once you pry the spoon from his mouth, refill and try again. It takes patience, but after a few hours he'll eat a few tablespoons worth.

Now all you have to do is hose down the baby and the tarp and you can get ready for bed. This is our new nightly ritual - until I can talk Andrea into using a turkey baster.