First Foods

Maks turned 6 months old last Tuesday, and that marked the day we were going to experiment with giving him solid food (in addition to continued breastfeeding).

I knew that we weren't going to go the sugary fruit route.  In fact, we plan to hold off on most fruits for quite some time.  I also didn't like the idea of cooking, steaming or baking the first food that Maks ate (which eliminated sweet potatoes from the potential first food lineup).  After a lot of thought, I'd set my mind on giving him avocados.  Immediately after visiting the doctor for Maksim's 6 month wellness checkup and getting the go-ahead to introduce solids, I made my way to the grocery store in search of a  handful of ripe avocados to use throughout the week.

Cue disappointment.  The grocery store was fresh out of organic avocados.  And there was no way that I was going to buy conventional for Maks' very first "real" meal.  Especially not when I'd been eating organically throughout my entire pregnancy and the first 6 months of breastfeeding.  JUST WASN'T GOING TO HAPPEN.

At the same time, Bryon and I had been anxiously awaiting feeding Maks solids, and I knew that coming home empty handed was going to be a big letdown.  So, I snagged some organic carrots and called it a morning (with every intent to stop by again the next day and pick up my avocados!).

As soon as Bryon got home for lunch, we started to prepare Maks' meal.  There really wasn't any true preparation involved.  One quick trip through our juicer (which does an awesome job of making baby food, by the way) and we were in business with raw carrots.  Without really thinking about what we were doing, we jumped in and started to spoon feed Maksim.  

It wasn't long (less than 2 feedings) when we both concluded that spoon feeding wasn't the right option for us.  We had researched the tendency for babies to open their mouths when something comes close and just didn't like the idea of Maks feeling pressured or forced to eat something when he wasn't hungry or interested.  So, we aren't going to use a spoon at every feeding/for the whole feeding.  Instead, we've decided to spend a fair amount of time presenting the food to Maksim and letting him decide for himself if he wants it (whether that means he wants to touch it, play with it or eat it [or feed it to Kira off the side of the table]).  It's all about exploring tastes and textures for now, and as with all things baby...it's going to get messy no matter how we do it!

FYI - I fixed the bug with the video of Maks crawling from last week's post on Learning.  Feel free to check it out!