Weaning and Des's first baby food

Oh my goodness.  Desmond is eating real people food!  It's kinda sad to me, primarily because his poopy diapers aren't the sweet (ha!) breastmilk poops anymore.  It's funny that I'm totally OK with cleaning Desmond's breastmilk poops and even dog poop, but the idea of cleaning human poops is disgusting to me.  So far, Desmond's poops have varied from army green (Billy's description) to black.  However, feeding a baby new foods is so exciting!  Since my favorite thing in life is food, I love giving Desmond new foods and being the first to watch him taste something new and watching his reaction to the new taste.

Des's first food was avocado.  I mashed half of an avocado up and added a bit of breastmilk.  Avocados are a perfect first baby food because they have a lot of good fats (especially the kind that helps develop those brain cells!).  I added the breast milk because 1, it's going to give it a sweeter taste so that Desmond doesn't spit it all out, and 2, because giving breastmilk as often as you can (considering your schedule and the baby's demands, of course) is the best thing for Des. 

Here's Desmond rather hesitant about eating the avocado.  Notice that wherever there's food, there's Pirate.

First bite!

HAHAHA!  He doesn't know what to make of it.  It looks like green slime that's frothing out of his mouth

Now he's getting into it!

He loves it!!!

We started off with one feeding a day.  Now that he's in his 7th month, we feed him breast milk every 4 hours and solids every four hours between the hours of 10 am and 5pm, so he's basically eating every 2 hours.  He's taken to the solids like a champ!  He loves the new tastes and textures.    We started off simply with purees of single fruits and vegetables...

Puree of carrots.  I squashed them a bit with my fork, but we ended up having to put them in a blender to achieve a mushier consistency.

We tried to use a potato masher for the squash.  By the way, he LOVES butternut squash.

To aid us in our food-making adventures, I bought one of these:

KidCo food mill

It looked really rinky dinky when we got it, but it's a workhorse.  We've used it to mash up not only fruits and vegetables but chicken and Thai food (Yes, Desmond loves Thai food, especially Ekamai food).  It's tiny enough that I can stash it in my diaper bag and take it with us when we go out to eat with Desmond so we can grind up the food we're eating.  

Our pediatrician, Dr. Wayne Cannon (who's an amazing pediatrician with IHC, if anyone's looking for one in SLC) told us that the AAP says that once babies start solids, they are able to eat whatever we're eating, as long as it's mashed up enough for them to swallow.  I wanted to give him single foods first (we only did a week or two of that) so that I could see how he would react to the taste, texture, if he would get a butt rash, etc.  As soon as he passed those few weeks, I started giving him what I was eating, whether it was Spanish food, Thai food...whatever.  He's been such a glutton!  He'll eat the solids we feed him and then sometimes even downs a bottle of breast milk.  We also bought some organic baby rice cereal to put in some of his milk bottles simply because Desmond needs to gain weight.  It doesn't offer a lot in terms of nutrition, but it does have iron and it does have calories.  

So, feeding Desmond solids has been a relatively easy and pain-free process for us.  I'm thankful that he inherited his appetite from me.  Hopefully, once he realizes he can make choices and vocalize them, he won't be too picky.