At our six-month visit to the pediatrician in early September, the doctor suggested (somewhat sternly) that he’d like Laurel to be “well established” on solids by 9 months, by which I think he means “comfortable with ingesting a variety of foods.” We hadn’t given her any food up to that point, and had been procrastinating doing so.
There are several signs that your baby is theoretically ready, including being able to sit on his or her own, being able to do a pincer grasp with thumb and forefinger, reaching for other people’s food or watching them interestedly when they eat, and no longer thrusting items out of his or her mouth with the tongue. Laurel was doing some of these, but even now she doesn’t sit that well on her own (and doesn’t seem interested in working on it). Plus, we didn’t know what we wanted to give her first, what foods we definitely wanted to delay or avoid, and so on.
It started with an apple core. I was eating an apple one day as we headed somewhere on BART, and when I was finished with it, I let her taste it. She sucked on it a few times interestedly, but didn’t raise any objections when I took it from her and threw it away. A week or so later, Devin gave her a taste of avocado, just a little chunk. She made the “yucky” face and spit it out. When she tried another bite, she gagged once it got to the back of her throat. We tried again a couple of days later, this time letting her serve herself, and got much the same response. We tried banana and sweet potato. She liked some of the banana “juice” but the chunks made her gag, and she was completely uninterested in the sweet potato. She’s also tasted daikon, spicy cheese, pomegranate seeds and bits of plain chicken.
Meanwhile, she’s been sucking on every apple I’ve eaten in the past two weeks, forcing them out of my hands if I won’t share. So I broke down and bought a jar of applesauce, and discovered this week that she’s happy to eat small bites of it, even opening her mouth for the spoon. Within a few days, she’d figured out that she should swallow it rather than spitting it out. She still makes a bit of the “yucky” face but she seems to enjoy it otherwise (although this enjoyment is often displayed by reaching for the spoon, grabbing a handful of applesauce, and then mooshing it into her face). Supposedly from here we’ll be able to get her to eat other things. We’ll see.
(That’s what she’s eating in the photo above. I know it looks like we’re torturing her, but in fact she was on her way to grabbing the spoon.)
That’s not all she’s been up to. Her scooting has gotten faster and faster, and is now interspersed with periods of being on her hands and knees or hands and feet (the latter with her butt stuck into the air). Both of these are precursors to real crawling, so she seems headed in that direction.
She’s devoted a lot of time lately to clambering over things, particularly us. And just a couple of days ago, I laid her in her crib after a diaper change and went to wash my hands. When I returned, she had pulled up to a wobbly stand, and got herself more upright when I stood by her and provided some higher hand-holds. From there, she crept over to a taller part of her crib and stood for several minutes.
The next day, she somehow pulled herself up on one of the coffee tables and went nuts grabbing pens, remote controls, and other fun stuff and knocking everything to the floor. I suspect the coming weeks will be spent sizing up every piece of furniture in the house for its potential to provide support for standing.
I just hope she learns to sit before she learns to walk.
– Beth
mooseloon said,
October 21, 2009 at 9:46 am
Is there a reason that the doctor feels strongly about this? Although it does now seem like she is showing signs of becoming interested in foods, this really seems much more like a “give them the opportunity and they’ll do it when they’re ready” type situation, particularly when she isn’t doing things like sitting on her own yet (although she does seem to just be skipping that stage.)