Day 12 – Breakfast

Malina is full swing teething and her sleep schedule is changing again. Both are signs that she’s developing and growing, but it is bittersweet as her mama. I’ve enjoyed her as a small newborn baby, then as a rolling infant, and now as a learning to crawl infant who will probably hit toddling before being a toddler. Her food journey is one of those things that show how she is progressing as well. How much food she eats, how she interacts with it, and what she can and can’t do. Everyday she gets closer to being able to pick up the food easier despite its shape or texture. She still has a lot of issues of course, this is only her second week, but I can see her improvements.

One of the things I wanted to do from the begging of our BLW journey was to introduce foods in different ways. Different textures, tastes, and ways of serving. I was able to do that very well with eggs during our egg allergen introduction but with dairy the concept is a little more complex. I don’t think Malina knows that one cheese is different from another or that yogurt and cheese (at least the ones were doing for now) come from cow milk. I’m sure that if I gave her sour cream or whipped cream the concept would still be lost on her. That would be a great thing for teaching a toddler, and is something I’ll probably revisit because that sounds fun.

So my point is that repetition can be important but there are things that don’t benefit from it. So since our dairy allergen introduction is not going to benefit I might as well find other things to repeat.

So today we did two things for a second time with slight alterations: rosemary carrots, this time steamed, and cinnamon applesauce.

The other part of our breakfast was cheddar cheese slices and turkey meat slices (no nitrates, because they told me to avoid them while pregnant and it’s easy to avoid for Malina for now). This is a very European breakfast I realize, it makes me especially remember mornings in Germany and Italy where there were a lot of cheese and meat like this offered in the morning. But I digress. This is Malina’s food adventure, not my reminiscing on travel adventures time.

So once I had the carrots cooked up I served our breakfast and sat Malina down. Today though, because of the teething no doubt, she was not as eager to eat.

Malina stared at her plate and me for almost five minutes before she finally decided to grab something. It took a lot of prompting, encouragement, and miming with my own food for my part. Also, I’ve noticed she usually goes for what is on the front left side as she grabbed the turkey.

She held it in her hands, pulling it apart before putting a piece to her mouth.

She was neither impressed or disgusted with the turkey. She took a little nibble and then pulled it apart more and threw it to the dog.

Pluto (the dog mentioned) is going to get fat at this rate. I can already see that I’m going to have to put him on a diet in the near future as Malina is getting better at tossing the food to the floor. Thankfully she hasn’t noticed Pluto eating it, otherwise she might start to do it on purpose.

The next thing she got around to was the cheddar cheese.

It probably proves her preference for the mozzarella since she nibbled on the cheddar before spitting it out. I was impressed by her actually biting off a piece to do so with though.

The next thing was the steamed rosemary carrots. Since she likes the baked rosemary carrots I figured this would be an easy one for her to like.

I was wrong. Texture means a lot to Malina. That’s why she only liked one kind of egg. So apparently, baked carrots are superior to steamed. I don’t mind her choice, I agree with it actually. There are only a few vegetables I like steamed, but it’s important to try so here we are.

Finally, I gave her a spoon with the applesauce. She did not eat the applesauce right away though and instead turned the spoon around to chew on it.

Oh, teething.

She did inevitably let me help her turn the spoon and then some of the applesauce made it to her mouth. She seemed pleased with it but she was not as gung-ho as she was with the yogurt. But hey, applesauce was a win.

Since Malina wasn’t very interested in her food and she had interacted everything, I let her have another five minutes before starting to clean her up and calling breakfast as being over.

So far the only dairy Malina likes is yogurt and mozzarella cheese. One is tart and the other very mild. So I think the next things we will try will be like those flavors. I have plenty of ideas. I also think that she would like plain applesauce more than cinnamon, so that is something I’ll play with too in the future. I can only think of two more methods for the carrots so I’ll keep those in mind as well. I

learned a lot from today, even if Malina didn’t eat much of anything. So this was a good way to remind myself that BLW is a journey and everyday doesn’t have to be measured by how much baby eats but what the experience has shown.

So remember, even if it’s hard to feel successful, you are doing great and you’ve got this!

-Erica