Things I Wish I Had Known About Feeding Babies...

A friend recently asked a few questions about feeding babies in advance of introducing solids to her little boy. It got me thinking about the whole feeding process. It's pretty crazy. I feel like I have learned a lot about feeding babies just by comparing Hank and Clara's various approaches. Hank is tougher to feed. He eats great in the beginning, but then slows down and adopts a mouth shut technique. The only way to get him to eat is to pretty much push the spoon against his closed gums. No fun.

Clara opens her mouth for most of the bites, but when she is done, she is done. She will start doing raspberries with the food in her mouth. Translation: the food is no longer in her mouth but all across me. Today, my shirt is peppered with an interesting apple/blueberry stain from this morning's noisy efforts.

But, all in all, here are my main tips for feeding, at least for my babies:
* Bigger spoon: those baby spoons are super ridiculous small
* Thicker is better: since our babies started solids at 6 months, we went straight to stage 2 foods. SOO much better.
* Oatmeal is better for boys than rice cereal. Don't ask why. You don't want to know why. Just trust me on this.
* If oatmeal isn't enough to help with boy's, uhm, processing, peaches do a better job of helping the situation than prunes.
* Variety is the key. Our kids eat a lot more if we give them three different things at a meal than a lot of any single thing.
* Accept a mess. It just will be a mess. Even when the kids get used to eating, then they want to play with their food more, which is equally a mess.
* Go as fast as possible. You have a limited window that the babies stay interested. Shovel as much as you can, as fast as you can, during this window. Once this window ends, all the laughing, blowing on their face, and singing doesn't really help.

I'm sure there are 10,000 other tips I can think of, but those are all I can come up with on a Sunday night after making a bunch more baby food.

We have friends in town this weekend, and it has been wonderful to see them. Hank and Clara have a preference for Mark and me, but they are willing to be held by others still. It will be very unfortunate when that ends!