Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Butternut Squash Breast Milk

James has officially entered into the wild and wonderful world of solid food. Real people food. Delicious food that I can't wait to introduce to him. Food is, by far, one of God's greatest gifts. If I were in a different socioeconomic bracket, I may even be considered a "foodie". I'm really hoping that James will develop an adventurous and healthy palate.

Since my Crohn's has returned, I can't keep on weight, yada, yada, yada, we decided that it would indeed be best to wean James. The only problem with this is that he REFUSES to take a bottle. It baffles me. Up until about a month or so ago, he took one just fine and now you'd think we were offering him something evil. SO frustrating.

We really have tried everything: replacing his least favorite feeding with the bottle (although, he really loves them all), waiting until he's really hungry, different bottle nipples, Jim only feeds him so he doesn't smell Momma, etc. So we decided to take a different, more gentle approach. I'll keep nursing, but introduce solids so that he'll need it fewer times during the day. I'm confident that my body can handle 4-5 feedings a day.

And, we knew he was ready. He gets really quiet and intent when we're eating as he watches the silverware go from plate to mouth. Even when he sits on my lap and I'm eating, he'll watch the food go to my mouth, craning his neck to see over his shoulder. We'd started rice cereal here and there but it didn't touch his appetite. He still ate at Mom's about every 3 - 3 1/2 hours.

Which brings us to yesterday. A butternut squash was baked, pureed, and fed to the little prince and he LOVED it! His arms were a-flappin' and he issued many happy monkey noises. It really was a blast.


Okay, so the funniest part about all of this is that I couldn't find my ice cube trays ANYWHERE, so I used my breast milk storage bags. But actually, I think it'll work fairly well, because it's easy to thaw them out in the sink and takes up less space than frozen cubes. I ended up with 12 servings of butternut squash!

I don't have a video of him eating the squash, but you'll get the idea of how excited he is to eat. Here's rice cereal:

4 comments:

Coty said...

That is genius, Sara! I have a ton of those bags leftover from when Charlie was a baby, so I suppose I can 're-use' them for this next baby. Be careful with the baby food making. It's addictive. At one point I had over 100 containers in my freezer, and I'd go to the store just to look for things to puree. LOL

The Via Colony said...

That's awesome! Way to make use of what you've got on hand, HA=) Hey, have you ever heard of Super Baby Foods? It's a book on how to make and prepare your own babyfood? It's awesome! It let's you know all the new foods you can introduce at the beginning of every new month for your baby. Just thought I'd pass it on if you were interested in anything like that.

michael craft said...

That video is weapons-grade cute.

Sarah said...

I'm so proud of YOU!