Well, after three weeks of thinking Addison won't eat because she is teething, I have finally come to the conclusion that it has nothing to do with teething, it has everything to do with Addison's strong independent streak! The girl is fiercely independent and it's a trait that we are so happy she has. It means that she will stand up for herself, that she will be capable of taking care of herself, and that she will be confident to try new things and be confident in who she is. We can already see all of these things in Addison, and we LOVE this about her.
When it comes to eating though... well the independence is making things just a little bit harder for us. Addison now refuses to eat anything that is pureed. She won't even eat her favorite things like sweet potatoes or apple sauce if it is pureed, she strictly wants real food, and better yet, she wants food that mama and daddy are eating, and she prefers to eat it off our forks/spoons and plates.
Eating real food might sound easier, and in some ways it is. We don't really have to make special meals for her, she can have whatever we are eating, and at this point she's even had all the high allergen foods and loves everything from salmon to peanut butter, pasta, rice and her favorite food by far right now is Gerber cheesies! The only thing she doesn't like is potatoes. The difficult part is that she only has two teeth, so it's not easy for her to eat all the things she wants to eat.
So I'm off to the grocery store today to find more foods for Addie girl that she can feed herself, and hopefully soon she will be eating enough to start weaning her off the formula and start her on real milk. Addie is a grazer, so it will be tough for us to be comfortable that she is eating enough throughout the day to stop the formula, especially since she loves her bubbas so much still, but we are working on it, and are in no rush to hurry her out of babyhood any time soon.
Ummm from a scared first time momma can i ask, (and I'm going to go stalk your blog more) how you introduced some of the non purees? Lexie's only 8months and we didn't start any food until just under 6months but she's the same way being stubborn, but we just keep trying and seeing what she'll take
ReplyDeleteMel, I was terrified to start her on real food because she has a really sensitive gag reflex and I was sure she would choke. She started purees just before 6 months and when she was 8 months I started giving her some gerber puffs. She gagged a lot on them at first, but then she figured it out and started sucking on them. I learned later that most babies push food to the roof of their mouths and gum them up with their tongues. Really my husband started giving her more food than I would have. She started getting really interested in what we were eating and would beg when DH was eating toast in the morning so he started letting her suck on it. It's really only been in the last month that she's really started eating and using her teeth so I started giving her bits of shredded cheese and more meltable snack foods like yogurt nibbles, gerber cheesies and arrowroot cookies. Once she used those to really get the hang of eating, I started making her her own meals in the last 2 weeks, like rice pasta spirals (rice pasta is very soft and easy to digest) with shredded cheese and milk to make mac and cheese, I started giving her scrambled eggs and peices of salmon, mushy chunks of fruit and veggies (dusted in baby cereal/cheerio dust so she can pick up the sticky foods) and stuff like that. At 11 months I felt comfortable giving her the strawberries/peanut butter and whole eggs. Right now she just wants bites of our food, or to be able to feed herself.
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