I have limited experience when it comes to feeding babies. In fact, my experience is limited to two weeks exactly, which is when I first attempted to add some food into baby Diana's breastmilk-only diet.
Apparently, according to my parenting guru, Penelope Leach, this isn't technically considered weaning yet since at this point I'm just trying to introduce my baby to different solids, as opposed to actually expecting her to get a lot of nutritional value from the food.
So at this stage, the babies play around with food and smear it everywhere and spit it up, but they don't actually consume very much of it at all.
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Or, in my case: from her first taste, baby D has grabbed my arm and the spoon, stuffed it into her mouth and demanded more. So despite knowing nothing about babies and food, I'm pretty sure she's into the whole eating thing (and has given new meaning to the expression
).
Of course, this shouldn't surprise me (nor would it surprise anyone who's met her father - who's probably eaten off their plates at some point - or seen me entering Topshop purely for the sweets section). But when she started shrieking for food at 4 pm every day after she had her first taste, I realised that our combined genetic codes may have created a very dangerous creature: a mini food monster.
So far, Baby D has tried 'real people' food, what we've been eating (minus the sweets, of course!), so she's had mashed potato with gravy, roasted potato (mashed up) with gravy, stewed apple, mashed banana and boiled egg, which she especially loved, which is unfortunate because you're meant to wait until babies are a bit older before giving them eggs (to avoid the danger of salmonella I think). Oops.
She's also tried some baby food: different flavours of Ella's Kitchen, which she loves because she can greedily grasp the packet and squeeze mushed up butternut squash and pumpkin or apple and banana into her mouth, and baby rice which I mixed with formula milk. Yes, Diana finally had her first taste of the 'other' kind of milk, which sadly didn't live up to its incredible reputation of drugging the baby into a Sleeping Beauty-esque all-night slumber... (although the introduction of food has helped her to sleep more).
So far, so good with our crash course in solids. But I have to wonder: if Diana's taken to all of the foods she's sampled so far this quickly, how soon before she's demanding caviar and foie gras?