Homemade Solids

Last week on my last day off, I went grocery shopping and got tons of fruit for Evie. She loves the jarred pears that we give her and I thought it would be fun to get her the real thing, but they still need to finish ripening before I can do anything with them. I also got strawberries, raspberries (but those were for me), peaches, and organic bananas. When I got home, I blended strawberries and bananas together until they were smooth and poured them into empty baby-food jars that I'd cleaned and boiled. I made six jars, but we were down to the last two this morning:

Evie really likes them! The mixture I made is a little thicker than the store-bought stuff--almost gelatinous--which makes it easier for her to keep it in her mouth. We also finally bought some rice cereal for her, despite everyone's insistence that she would hate it. However, she actually really likes it. Of course, that's probably because I don't give her straight rice cereal! When I first mixed formula into a bowl of rice cereal, the smell almost made me puke and I decided that if I couldn't stand the smell, I wasn't going to force my baby to eat it. So I mixed in a jar of her pears. She gobbled it all up! In fact, she got grouchy that I wasn't spooning it into her mouth fast enough. She's been doing that a lot lately, actually, with all of her food. Today, I made her a bowl of rice cereal mixed with applesauce, and she kept crying for more while she had entire mouthfuls still in her mouth; I seriously couldn't keep up no matter how hard I tried.

I'm looking forward to when the pears are finally ripe so I can blend them for her and see how she feels about "real" fruit. I'm so excited that I get to share new things with my sweet baby, and see how she reacts to everything. I look forward to helping her expand her palate and experience fun tastes, especially during the coming holiday season. I think she'll really enjoy things like pumpkin pie, mashed potatoes and gravy, rolls, sweet-potatoe pie, cranberry sauce, maybe even a little turkey. I'm really trying hard to give her an unbiased taste of the world, unaffected by my own likes/dislikes, and Thanksgiving will give me an excellent chance to act on that since I only like about half of the "traditional" dishes. I think she'll have a really good time being passed around to everybody and being fed tiny bites of fun food!