Monday 8 February 2010

Food, Glorious Food...

...Lukewarm milk and baby rice!

Alex is on to solids.  Well, I say solids.  The weird goop that is Heinz First Foods Baby Rice isn't solid in any recognisable sense of the word.  It looks like wallpaper paste.  It smells significantly worse.  God alone knows what it tastes like!

We've started weaning a touch early (the advice is ideally to wait until 6 months) in a vain effort to get Alex to sleep better.  (Still waking up three or four times at the moment.  Urgh.)  The health visitor suggested it would be worth a shot.  If he wasn't ready, he wouldn't eat it.  If he was, it might help him settle over night.  Well, anything's worth a shot at the moment!

Having got used to breast feeding, solid food is a bit of a palaver.  First, boil the kettle half an hour in advance.  Mix tepid kettle water with formula powder.  (You can use expressed breast milk for this too, but that's even more of a pain.)  Create 40mls of foul smelling milk substitute.  Mix in somewhere in the region of 2tsps of Baby Rice.  (A very curious substance.  It's actually rice flour fortified with vitamins, not actual grains of rice.  It looks a bit like artificial sweetener to me.)  Add more rice if required to create a sludgy, slightly lumpy goo of a viscosity somewhere between natural yoghurt and unset cement.

Next, prepare Alex.  Dress child in all over plastic smock (oddly decorated with a picture of a toddler holding a monkey).  Add further cloth bib around neck.  (The rice would just slide down the plastic smock and end up on his trousers.)  Put child in high chair.  Stuff cushion down the back of the chair to prop child up.  (Alex is really a month to young for the chair.)

Feed child.  Because it's just that easy...

Actually, touch wood, so far it is pretty easy to get the food into him.  Alex was clearly ready for a bit of solid food and lunges at the spoon with glee.  Sadly, he doesn't lunge with a whole host of co-ordination, however, and it often results in the spoon ending up in his cheek/chin/nose rather than his mouth.  He's not quite grasped the whole swallowing thing fully either.  Specifically, he's a touch confused as to whether or not you can breathe out at the same time as having a mouthful of baby rice.  (Answer: yes, technically.  It does mean your parents get showered in rice goo though.)

Gods, solids already.  Doesn't time fly?

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