Adventures in Dining

So I am trying the whole "baby led weaning" concept. This is not the idea of letting the baby cue you when he is ready to stop breastfeeding (if this were the case Andrew and Quinn may still be breastfed to this day I fear) - but it is a way of introducing solids. I think the concept comes over from the UK so they phrase it differently than we would here.

So Teagan has tried bread in various forms (pizza crusts, bagels, sourdough bread bowl tops, etc.) and he has tried clementines and broccoli. I am trying to stick with only one really new food at a time, but it is hard to sometimes limit things. So the new food of the day was bananas. Now -- the back story on this is that as a kid I really did not like bananas and even today as an adult I really don't like them once they are over ripe. I really don't like the idea of mushing up a banana and spoon feeding it to my kids as baby food though I sucked it up and did so with the other guys.

So with the baby led weaning concept - I get to just hand him a banana. But I know already this won't go well and there will be a big mess. I had read on another blog (see here) that I could leave the peel on and then he could grab that and work on it. She also suggested trimming the peel a bit and giving only half the banana. All great suggestions -- and it went fairly well... up until he had already knocked off two big chunks of it and was madly trying to suck down anything left in the peel to the point where all that was left was the peel...

Well, here - you've got to see it for yourselves:


So here he is happily enjoying the banana (with a crazed death grip on it by the way)















Next I have yanked the peel away from him because he was trying to eat just that. He is so hysterical about it that he doesn't notice the banana pieces in front of him that I have rescued from the high chair.















Now he sees them and is happier -- but not for long because they go flying out of his hands and he gets mad again right way (I can't grab the camera again this time because I had to clean my hands again after the rescue).















Ahhh... but them mom saves the day and I tossed the pieces into this baby food holder thing that we had from when the twins were babies. Of course, the downside it is a horrendous device to clean after banana has been mashed through it. But he was very happy with it until he had mashed it to liquid and had nothing left in it and I was not ready for a second round so he got scooped up and taken upstairs for bath time.















So I am expecting strange diapers in the near future because I am pretty darn sure he actually ingested some of this. Most of his "eating" so far has been purely recreational. Our way of saying "see little man, you get food just like the big people" as a way of appeasing him during mealtimes. But apparently, he really likes this stuff and thinks we have been holding back. I assume he may be more demanding about it now. We'll see. Of course an added bonus was that the whole thing totally grossed out the older boys which I found funny as they generally are the ones trying to gross ME out.