{"id":1326,"date":"2011-01-21T06:52:53","date_gmt":"2011-01-21T12:52:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/archives\/1326"},"modified":"2011-01-21T06:52:53","modified_gmt":"2011-01-21T12:52:53","slug":"gentle-gentle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/archives\/1326","title":{"rendered":"Gentle. GENTLE!"},"content":{"rendered":"

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80’s been eating adult food (non-pureed solid food, you sicko) for a month and a half now. It’s taking me a while to figure out BLW. She’d been cramming entire “sticks” of food in her mouth, so I started giving her smaller sticks of food (which works, because she’s gotten the fine motor skills to hold them … mostly). She’d just stick more smaller sticks of food in her mouth, creating the same traffic jam, just in more chokeable chunks. Today I had cut up apple into 1\/16th sticks, and left a quarter for myself. I was feeling playful, and offered it to 80 (I bit off the skin around the edges so it wasn’t … so she couldn’t … you know, get a paper cut with the skin. I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t happen, but I’m a little short on sleep.)<\/p>\n

She LOVED IT. This is what she’s wanted all along. She happily gnawed on the apple (both soft side and skin side) for a good long while. She cried when I took it away (she’d been rubbing her eyes so furiously, I knew we needed to get her cleaned up and on to napping pronto). The look in this picture is her “extreme pleasure” face.<\/p>\n

The big lesson is that the baby-led weaning book I love (Baby-Led Weaning: helping your baby to love good food<\/a>)* really does know what they’re talking about. There’s a picture of a baby nomming on a whole apple, and I thought “yeah, maybe in a few months”.<\/p>\n

Also, I remember my friends Abby and Sara having to keep apples on hand at all times, when their son would nom on a whole one for a snack every day. They’d have to keep track, so the chewed-on apple didn’t end up forgotten under his bed, since he took it to play with him all over their house.<\/p>\n

The word “apple”, much like the word “fork” will become hilarious as 80 learns to say them, and yet sounds more like she’s swearing a blue streak. Remind me to take a video of her narrating eating an apple with a fork.<\/p>\n

*which is now “translated” into American English, so courgette becomes zucchini and spello-tape becomes Scotch tape. One of the authors left a comment here, to let me know.<\/p>\n