"I like to eat, eat, eat ...."

In my previous post I alluded to a certain milestone that was recently met, and based on the above photo, I'm sure you can figure out what that was. That's right, Maribelle is now a solids-eating baby!! For months now, we've been getting drilled with questions about when Maribelle was going to get her first taste of food, particularly rice cereal. Up until this point, she's been exclusively breastfed, and she's been doing a mighty fine job of it, if I do say so myself. We decided to hold her off on solids until six months, which is what most pediatricians recommend, so with that date not far off, we decided to start her culinary journey last week while Grandma A. was still in town.


I had been debating whether or not to start Belle with rice cereal, or whether I should skip right to tastier foods such as avocado or sweet potato. Well, I decided to give rice cereal a go as Belle's first meal, and our little girl is a natural-born eater! (We're totally not surprised). She ate a pretty hearty portion for her first go at solids (maybe a tablespoon in all). But, she quickly decided that the rice cereal wasn't so yummy after all. I think after taking a second to actually taste the gloppy, clumpy stuff, she decided it totally wasn't worth it. And I don't blame her! So, we quickly moved on to avocado, and she LOVES the stuff. Get this girl a tortilla chip, cause she wants guacamole!!


After eating avocado for a few days, we moved on to bananas, which is where we are right now. She's lukewarm about the bananas (which surprises me!), but I have a hunch it's a texture thing. So I used Jeremy's handy-dandy hand blender to mash up the bananas to a smoother consistency, so we'll see how that goes. From here, we move on to sweet potatoes, which totally excites me (oh how I wish I could melt marshmallows on top!). She's getting food twice a day, in the morning and then at night, and right now, her portions are still very small. She's still practicing all the new tongue and mouth motions and getting used to the idea of eating something other than liquids. Which might explain the new noises she's making now with her mouth. The clip below shows one of the newest sounds she's been making (you might have to turn your volume all the way up to get the full effect). Oh, and she screams now. In pure delight. But nevertheless, she screams. And we love, love, love it.