Baby Led

The other day Joshua went out to buy Christmas presents for his brothers. I'm really proud of the boys for deciding to use their own money to buy their own presents this year. (for those regular/long time readers, you'll be amazed to know that our new practice of giving pocket money is entering its fourth week! A record for a "new idea" for us lol)

This morning I set out early for Sainsburys, only to find myself amongst 30 cars circulating the car park searching for a parking space... so I gave up and came home.

Instead, I made our first Christmas cake (history of the number of cakes in our house, see December 2005 and December 2006 references!). Once again, I've settled on the best gluten free Christmas cake recipe there is, also making it dairy free by using Pure sunflower margarine. It has come out perfect!

Then after lunch Roarke dropped me at the supermarket and went around to someone from church who had a car seat for us. Although he is only 6 1/2 months, like Samuel before him, Jonathan has physically outgrown his rear facing baby seat and so we've moved him to face forwards in this seat (new and unused, and passed on free - such a blessing).

After he came back to collect me, I then dropped him and Samuel and William down the high street so that they could buy Christmas presents for each other and Joshua.

I just had time to come home and feed Jonathan before collecting them again (we only ran around in the car today because of time restraints; usually they'd walk up and down to the high street).

This evening I'd decided to give the boys a special evening, so they had home made "Walls Balls" in a nest of potato, with carrot "flowers". Yes, I did make it look like a bird's nest!

Its a hang over from when Joshua was about 3 and went through a stage of not eating; unless the food LOOKED good, he wouldn't eat it. So toast had to look like "tubby toast", dinner was shaped into scenes (Thomas shaped potato, on a railway track of carrot sticks, peas for grass, etc etc!). I got quite creative in the end! It only lasted a few months, but ever since then I tend to have the occasional "mad mum" moment and present them with "volcanoes", "islands", "landscapes" and other mad things!

I'm actually pleased that they are growing up believing that food should please the eye as well as the taste buds.

Roarke collected a high chair off of freecycle this evening, which is fabulous; a real all singing all dancing one that we could never have afforded!

And I must just thank the ladies on the Fluff list, and on the HE-SP lists; thanks to their ideas, I investigated Child Led Weaning. I found the whole idea absolutely fascinating, and it made so much sense to us. Thanks especially to Deb on Fluff, who chatted the whole thing through with me, we tried this evening to give him a steamed carrot (half thickness, half the lenght of a small carrot) to hold. To our amazement he stuck it in his mouth, chewed, sucked, broke a HUGE bit off, pushed it around his mouth, and swallowed! He ate the whole thing, with obvious relish.

Amazing!

The child won't eat any puree, any mush; anything off a spoon.

Brilliant stuff. Do look into it!

Off to celebrate with a festive sherry....

ps Jonathan started crawling today!