Has it really been a MONTH almost since my last blog? *Sigh* - my goal was to update this at least 3 times per month. Perhaps this fall I will do better. Anyway, we have a few new updates in our household. We recently started giving Olivia solid foods, which, has been an eye-opening experience. WHOA the mess!!! We started her off on sweet potatoes which so far seems to be her favorite. Next we progressed to banana, avocado, pears, green beans and now we've started rice cereal. I am making everything homemade using my Beaba Babycook (LOVE!!!). From the get-go, Olivia was way more interested in the spoon and holding, touching, feeling, and biting this amazing utensil than she was in the food it contained. Funny enough, we had entertained the idea of doing a new approach to start babies on solids called "baby-led weaning" where you place small amounts of age appropriate foods on their trays and let them feed themselves. The idea behind it is that they will choose the appropriate amount of foods based on what their body needs and the nutrients they are lacking. In hindsight, I think we should have stuck with this approach since she definitely wants to be an independent eater. She refuses to take a bite from the spoon unless she is also holding the spoon (and of course, by "holding" I mean that she's grabbing the end with the food on it with both hands and then trying to shove all of that into her mouth). This makes for very tedious and extremely messy mealtimes. Today, while feeding her bananas, things were going quite smoothly until I looked away for a moment. When I turned around she was grinning at me from ear to ear with banana in her hair, ears and eyelashes. How this happened in the three seconds in which I was not looking I'll never know, but we sure go through alot of laundry cleaning her up from meals!
I recently purchased a new toy for Olivia after deciding that she seemed bored with all of her "baby" toys (rattles, things with heads on them, etc.). We bought her first real toy called a Squish. It has been around for decades and I remember seeing other kids have it when I was little (I don't recall actually owning one myself) and I liked that it was wood, had vibrant colors and was interesting enough to engage her for a good length of time. She really liked it right off the bat and is very content to sit and play with it every day. She also is still very interested in books and loves to be read to. Her favorite is when we lay next to her on her blanket and read Put Me in the Zoo holding it way up high above her face. She gets so excited she can barely contain herself and it's really adorable. Afterwards, she holds the book and studies it VERY carefully.
Olivia is now 7 months (!!!) and recently we have been putting her in the big-girl high chair at restaurants. The first time we did this, we took her to an Indian restaurant and put her in the chair (with her special, custom-made high-chair and cart cover made by Grammie Lennex!), and she immediately leaned forward, put both hands on the table and licked it. AHHHHH the horror. Needless to say, the next time we did this, we brought sanitizing wipes and cleaned the table first. Ewwwww.
In other news, she has been teething for what seems like FOREVER. Those of you who have kept up with this know that she started getting her teeth fairly early (around 4 months) and JUST this past week did the first one appear. She has her first bottom tooth about halfway in and the second one is probably going to pop through in the next few days. This has been a miserable process for all of us (no sleep, lots of fussing/whining) so we are so happy that she'll be free from pain for a bit - at least until more decide to come in.
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