Julie's Boggle

Jonathan was 7 months old yesterday and has been on “solids” for just over a month. As it happens, this fits in with the modern thinking on the best age to introduce solid foods, but really it’s because when we tried before, we just got lots of drooling and not much interest.

Just after Christmas, we tried Jon on the time-honoured, favourite first food of baby rice mixed with formula and this was received favourably.

From there we rapidly moved on to trying puréed carrots followed by all the other “first taste” vegetables (butternut, swede, sweet potato, parsnip) as recommended by baby-food guru Annabel Karmel in the handy book we got for Christmas.

(I avoided fruit for a little while because of a suspicion — this happened with a friend’s baby — that arousing Jon’s sweet tooth too early might cause him to reject vegetables, but this was a needless concern, Jon pretty much eats everything we’ve tried so far. )

We’d introduced the rice at lunch time, but as we moved onto vegetables, the rice (or alternative porridge, like millet) moved to the later feed with just veggies at lunch. And not long after, I did notice that Jon was ferociously hungry in between his two morning feeds (07h00 and 10h30), which apparently is the sign for more food in the mornings. So began the next step of following his early morning breast feeding with some baby oats.

This leaves us with a schedule adjusted as follows:

07h00: Full breast-feed (i.e. until he tires of it or the milk runs out) followed by 40ml baby oats at 08h15 after Mom and Dad have eaten and Dad’s left for work.

11h30-ish: Half a breast-feed followed by 2 “cubes” (baby food frozen in ice-cube trays – each of these weighs about 27g) of a protein-based vegetable dish (we haven’t progressed past chicken yet) and another 2 cubes of different mixed vegetable purées. Then 15g of fruit fromage frais, or baby yoghurt as we call it.

14h45: Full breast-feed although he doesn’t usually take as much at this time.

17h30: 30ml baby porridge (rice or millet) made with formula and 2 cubes of puréed fruit mix (or half a small banana) with another 10ml porridge mixed into it. And sometimes some plain yoghurt too, to dilute the sweetness further.

18h30: Full breast-feed after his bath.

22h30: Ever decreasing amounts (we’re down to 100ml now) of formula from a bottle.

So far everything we’ve tried has gone done relatively well. Jon got into the slightly frustrating habit of blowing raspberries early into his sixth month and when combined with a wet mouthful of puréed broccoli or “sweet vegetable medley” this does tend to leave one wanting a large apron or a perspex shield!

Fortunately he’s mostly too busy enjoying his food to think about making any noises other than shrilling for more if he thinks we’re taking too long between mouthfuls or courses.

In the early days, we had to make do with feeding Jon supported on the couch or in his bouncy chair, but I managed to secure a Bumbo baby seat (what he’s sitting in in the above photo) for cheapish on Ebay and this made a huge difference in the mess-factor.

Overall, introducing solids has been fun in terms of trying new things and creating some variation in our day… But it’s also a fair amount of extra work in organising the ingredients and preparing his meals!

Finally, for those of you who don’t mind the 8MB download and want to watch a little clip of Jon eating his morning porridge (apologies, he’s a little camera-focussed when it’s around), then you can download a clip here.

WARNING: I haven’t managed to make the video play on Windows XP in anything other than Picasa so sadly there’s a good chance it might not work for you if you don’t have Picasa to watch it. (If anyone has any good tips on compressing camera-taken movies I’d LOVE to hear them.)

UPDATE: Thanks to all the commenters. It seems like “VLC” is the free video player of choice, and it definitely plays this video. The Windows VLC download is under 10MB and can be found here.

In the above photo, Jonathan is modelling a “Happy Nappy” (Medium) in navy-blue and white neoprene which is fitting comfortably over a Tesco’s “Small” disposable swim nappy.

The above stylish gear was a prerequisite for Jon’s class with WaterBabies – an organisation that runs baby-and-parent swimming classes that I’ve signed up for this term.

When we arrived at our first lesson, the instructor was very apologetic because the water that week was 2°C colder than expected — at 32°C instead of 34°C! Ooh, brr! Because of this unexpected “chill”, they handed out dinky baby wetsuits for our infants (Fortunately a LOT easier to put on than adult wetsuits, these ones start off flat and velcro does the rest.) Unfortunately there wasn’t really time to fish out my camera again, but the overall effect was high on the cuteness factor.

After that we each took it in turns to hand our baby to the instructor, Lo, and climb into the waist-deep (mm, beautifully warm) pool. Then Lo passed the baby back and we were directed to walk around the pool’s edge, cuddling our little ones,talking to them continually, gradually getting ourselves and the baby wet up to our shoulders.

The pool itself was square and about 4m long with one corner cut off where a big ledge and the steps fitted. Into that we fitted about 6 mums and babies and our instructor. Lo has a great loud voice, which was handy as the previous class were getting changed in the adjacent changing rooms and some of the babies were not at all happy any more!

Our first lesson was mostly about getting us all comfortable with the water and the “swimming” position: supporting the babies with our hands under their chests and dragging them forward through the water (“Keep those arms straight and relaxed everyone!”) as we reversed. Hard work for the shoulders, let me tell you!

Following that, we got right into practising the various water-techniques with the babies. The first was getting the baby’s attention, (“Jonathan…Ready, steady…Go.”) and then pouring water over his face from a cupped hand. The idea with this was to teach the babies that at these key-words they should close their eyes.

It did seem like a good foundation, but at 3 – 4 repetitions, we were definitely going to need to do it quite a few more times to make it sink in. And one-month-old William was still very much asleep at that point! (Yes, he slept through the swimming too, it was very cute and he could have easily been an Anne Geddes model. )

After that, and a bit more swimming, we simulated falling in from a sitting position on the side (just the babies, not the mums!) a few times. “Team! They’re practising FALLING in, you’re not giving them flying lessons!”, was Lo’s dry response to our first try. (There’s a small possibility that I might have gone “Wheeee!” as I pulled Jon towards me.)

And lastly there was a brief dunking for each baby. We were briefed on all the possible reactions the babies might make to the immersion and told not to kiss and cuddle but to immediately go into effusive praise and “bouncing them on the water” so they’d not think it was an accident or something that required comforting.

Then Lo took each baby in turn, dunked them and swooped them into the hands of the waiting mum to “bounce around the pool”. None of the babies cried – Jon looked a little surprised – but it got little William’s attention and he finally woke up. Bless.

Jon was fairly laid-back for the entire 30 minute session, but at its end he was getting quite hungry and his good humour was wearing thin. I still had to dry and dress both of us before we could feed so there was a fair bit of unhappiness, but I’ve got some ideas for helping with that next time.

So overall, a success I think! And certainly a fun diversion and another opportunity for me to get out of the house and meet other mums.

At 6 months, Jon was far too young to “get” Christmas in any form this year, but we certainly enjoyed it on his behalf.

On the Saturday evening before Christmas, we cruised out of London on quiet motorways with Jon first awake quietly and watching the street lights, then later sleeping peacefully in his car seat in the back. We made excellent time, arriving at Simon and Nicola’s at 22h00. It was all good.

I hadn’t looked forward to the idea of three nights of sharing our room with young Jon (he was NOT a silent sleeper when we did this in SA), but this time it was better than expected. He did call out a little in his sleep from time to time, but it was nothing that sheer tiredness didn’t get me past quite easily.

This year’s Christmas roast was a goose. (We always get something interesting out of Nicola. )

The 12lb (5.4kg) goose (which had to undergo some amputations before it would fit into the roasting tin) yielded copious quantities of goose fat which made absolutely DELICIOUS roast potatoes. In hindsight, the gravy could have done with less goose fat and less flour, but we didn’t let that stop us from enjoying the excellent repast.

The trip home was a somewhat less tranquil than the trip out… at least for the first 90-odd miles. After being an absolute angel for the afternoon at Tom’s family’s Boxing Day celebrations, Jon decided that his car seat in the back seat was unequivocally not somewhere that he wanted to be that evening.

We quickly discovered that when we stopped and poked our heads in the back to talk to him, he still had plenty of potential for being cheerful. That lasted all of 30 seconds once we’d left the parking lot. For the rest of the time, we made our journey in 15 – 20 mile hops (that’s how far apart the service stations were on the motorway) between pauses to re-establish that the screaming was, in fact, not that serious.

And no, we did try that, not interested in feeding either.

Eventually it occurred to me to dig out our cache of dummies from the depths of the changing bag and I held one in place (not the easiest of poses to maintain from the front seat but the back of the car was jam-packed) until it all went quiet. From then on, it was a very quiet and peaceful trip!

For a while now I have been trying to perfect my banana bread baking. According to the expert cook I consulted (my Mom), this is not the easiest because of the variability you get in one of the main ingredients – the bananas.

(The variation in banana size and stage of ripeness can make a big difference to the batter and therefore the exact cooking time required.)

Anyhoo, this time I thought I would get it spot on. I had 5 perfectly average bananas in a slightly advanced stage of ripeness (i.e. too spotty for me to want to eat them.) And this time I made sure I used caster sugar instead of regular sugar because it turns out our regular sugar doesn’t “cream” well with the butter and this lends a certain brick-like consistency to the finished product.

I followed the recipe diligently, knocking it out during an episode of Baby Einstein. Then got back to feeding Jon and waiting for my perfect loaf to bake.

I’d noticed some wateriness about the bananas when I was mashing them, so I wasn’t too surprised when the loaf hadn’t finished baking after the hour the recipe advised. I turned the oven down a little because it had attained a very pleasing brown colour already, and reset the timer.

Even after another half-hour of cooking, I still wasn’t overly suspicious about the preponderance of moisture inside the loaf, but when we got to the end of the second hour, enough was enough and I pulled it out.

I was musing over this strange sticky phenomenon while hanging up the laundry and waiting for the dubious loaf to cool. Tom meanwhile was reading out loud through the recipe which I’d left on the surface.

It was when he got to the line “Half a cup of milk and water”, that the hammer blow struck. No!! I’d put in a whole cup(!), roughly chucking in about half a cup of water followed by milk to bring it up to 250ml.

Good grief, half a cup of liquid extra, no wonder it wasn’t setting.

On the plus side, we dug into it (with spoons) while it was still warm and Tom decreed it to be the best banana flop ever. Warm, crunchy, chewy banana bread outside; soft, gooey banana-bread flavoured interior. Quite yummy and I think it would go well with custard.

I suppose as flops go, it could have been a lot worse.

… My friend Grace gave to me,

A cute Christmas outfit for Jon.

Doesn’t he look sweet?

(Bet you he hates this photo when he’s a teenager. )

We had a pretty relaxing New Year’s Eve last night playing games with some friends who also have a small baby. The game in question was Settlers of Catan Cities and Knights and it was fairly new for most of us.

As a result, while we’d more or less planned to miss the whole New Year’s “event”, we were actually still finishing off the game when 2008 rolled around!

It was definitely a learning game, but a fairly close finish and as a triumphant start to the new year, I snatched victory from right under Tom’s nose.