6 month update for C

Cedrik is 6 months old today.

Six months old! While pregnant with Leona I had come across something called baby led weaning (BLW), that I was totally into following. Basically it is letting them have control over the process. You prepare food they can eat, place it in front of them, and let them explore the textures with all their senses. You do not mush it, because their gums are hard - they can chew stuff (soft stuff, not stringy stuff like celery or really tough meat...but they can suck on meat if the pieces are big enough that they can't put it all in their mouth). They need to be able to sit independently (in a highchair, sure), and you let them bring the food to their mouth rather than feed them. This way they are in full control.

Leona tasted her first food - a banana - when she was about seven months old I think, a little before we left Taiwan. And she sucked on some other fruits and had some pear too. And then we were adjusting to life in Norway and her eating fell by the wayside, just once in a while making her some baby porridge if I remember correctly (so I was feeding her with a spoon). She didn't seem super interested in food anyhow, was very content with nursing.

With Eliana we were in Taiwan when she started eating, at about 6 months old I think, and it wasn't really convenient because we weren't in full control of our meals - Judge's mom made our lunch a lot, and we had dinners at his grandma's with some of the extended family, or we would eat out. She tried some foods, but didn't have her own space (her own chair) and it wasn't conducive to BLW. By the time we moved back to Norway she was already 8 months old, and we started letting her feed herself a lot more.

With Cedrik I've taken a very different approach. First of all, he started tasting things a lot earlier - he's been tasting banana off and on for almost two months now...and some other fruits. In the beginning he mainly just sucked on them with me holding on tight, and would get some small pieces down into his stomach. He was totally not developmentally there in terms of chewing and moving things smoothly to the back of his mouth, but more 'nursing' the food. And the hand-to-mouth coordination was not there either.

But recently there has been big changes. The past few weeks I've upped what he's tried, to include a lot of our dinner foods. So far he's tried the following: bananas, tangerines, sucked on apples, had sweet potato, potato, oatmeal porridge (lumpy kind that we eat...he was soooooooo not impressed), rice porridge (also not very impressed expression...I think the texture on these weird him out), sucked on garlic steamed broccoli, had various forms of egg (hard cooked, soft scrambled, other Taiwanese way), grapes, raisins, avocado (he LOVED this...smooth texture), Taiwanese egg pudding with crab sticks and shrimp (his all-time favorite, last night...also smooth, though he only had the egg it was flavored by the other content).

And this morning as I was holding him and cutting and buttering Eliana's waffles, he snagged one and brought it straight to his mouth. Very content. I put him in his highchair and put the waffle piece on the tray, and his concentration to grab it was mesmerizing, but once he got a hold of it he moved it off to the side, and let go, not realizing he had made it disappear, just looking at a small, small piece that was left behind, so less than impressed, and started to complain about the situation - this complaining will escalate quickly if he doesn't get to taste more food fast. So I brought the big piece back and held it up for him to eat. Happy happy. (Video of what I just described).



So it is not 100% BLW this time either, as I still hold a lot of the food to his mouth for him to lean forward and taste, but as his coordination improves I can let him take control more and more. Pretty fun stuff.

In other news, he still nurses super often day and night, and sleeps fitfully - just short sleeps during the day and not for long at a time during the night. Of course when his teeth (he has two lower front teeth!) were coming in the sleep situation was a lot harder, and that was when Judge was working a lot of overtime and I was cooking dinner every week-day.

He smiles more than either of the girls did, while at the same time being way more picky about who holds him than they were. Basically it's just me that is an acceptable option 99% of the time. But Leona doesn't give up. She loves holding him and carrying him and just being with him. And E loves to play and interact with him too. And thankfully Judge is father enough that he just laughs and teases C lovingly about it rather than getting upset that Cedrik doesn't want to be held by him.

He's getting more stable at sitting, and still sometimes rolls onto his stomach, and rolled once onto his back again. But he doesn't like to be on the floor much, and prefers to be in my arms or in the manduca if I need to make food or hang up laundry.

Another big moment was a couple weeks ago when he said "mama" amongst complaints and cries and screams in Judge's arms. It is the second time I've heard Cedrik say it - first time a few days before that, and the second time made me even more certain that he was in fact really calling for me. How sweet the sound!


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