Monday, February 23, 2009

Finished, now get me outta here!

This is Soren's first sign, which he has been doing for a week or so in response to me asking, "Soren, are you finished eating?" (while doing the sign to him). To his credit, he seems to only do it back when he is actually finished. He does not, however, think it is appropriate for me to ask him if he is finished with his bath, and laughs like I am making a joke. I guess he thinks it only applies to dinner time!

This is what the sign is actually supposed to look like...we will be working on technique refinement this week.

We are still working on hungry, more, yogurt, banana, water, cheese, cheerios, and club soda. We'll probably start working on hurt, too, since he gets a new bruise every other day as he balances for more and more seconds hands-free. He's up to about 7 seconds of serious balancing effort.

Friday, February 20, 2009

Dinner update

Soren wasn't crazy about all the food I made last weekend.

• Swiss chard puréed with chicken stock + ground baked potato skins - NOPE. Too salty (the stock was really concentrated). I mixed it with the baked potato, which he then ate, but not with gusto. The rest of the chard I mixed with some pumpkin purée and green beans with almonds. He likes this mess!

• Mashed baked potato + cheddar - he liked it fine, but didn't LOVE it.

• Polenta + fresh mozzarella - he seemed to think it was only okay.

• Baked sweet potato mashed with cheddar - YUM! He loves his sweet potatoes.

Tonight I made some chunkier stuff. He has been eating green beans, banana chunks, black beans, pasta letters, and cheese with his fingers, so I am probably not going to be doing too much puréeing anymore.

Sadly, when something is too slippery for him to easily pick up, he just uses his face to eat it right off the table. Poor monkey! Mom starves him!

Some items for this week:


• Puréed stewed prunes + millet.
• Cooked pear + banana mashed with millet (hope he likes millet!).
• Roasted yellow pepper, puréed & blended with goat cheese + pesto. Roasting the pepper under the broiler was the best fun of the evening. I highly recommend it!

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Dance, monkey!


Soren attended his first concert today!

It was for positive hip hop for kids, which was pretty cute.

He appeared somewhat overwhelmed by all the crazy children bouncing off the walls as well as the loud music.

So, we left early to get some beers downstairs (it was at the Globe)...

Soren stuck his hand in Tommy's Guinness within one second of the waitress putting it on the table. She clearly didn't have kids of her own. Soren had a slice of Swiss cheese...

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Soren is SO thoughtful!

These are my first flowers from Son. The card said "Be my valentine!" He's so bossy; I think he gets that from Grandma.

Friday, February 13, 2009

Soren eats

Making baby food is a LOT of fun! Everything mentioned here is steamed except potatoes and sweet potatoes, which are much better (tasting) baked, and grains, which I just cook on the stove top as directed.

Little man eats a ton. In general, he eats two of the following for breakfast: half a piece of buttered wheat toast, an entire banana, 2 ounces of YoBaby yogurt (his new favorite).

For lunch, Nanny says he's a vacuum--he eats around 6 ounces total. That's a LOT of food for a little baby!

For dinner, he also eats around 6 ounces. I try to give him three colors at any one sitting, such as white (banana, yougurt, potato) + orange (carrots, sweet potato)+ purple (eggplant, blueberries, blackberries), or green (broccoli, spinach, peas) + red (tomato sauce, strawberries) + yellow (squash, corn).

For his two big snacks a day, he likes Purely O's (organic version of Cheerios) and cubed cheese (especially extra sharp cheddar, what a weirdo). He also likes diced strawberries and pear, but he gets really frustrated at those because they are SUPER slippery and suction to the table really easily.

Some recent major meal hits have been:

• Ground filet mignon with polenta and pureed tomato-cream sauce (chicken stock, tomato paste, white wine, onion and garlic, cream, and romano cheese). He doesn't usually get such complicated food, but this was a slight adjustment to something Tommy and I had for dinner.

• Puréed beef stew

• Puréed chicken vegetable soup

• Puréed broccoli + baked potato + romano cheese. Yum, this was so good I wanted to eat it myself.

• Purée of apple/pear/broccoli. Surprisingly tasty!

• Peas--so fun and easy to pick up!

Some things that did not go over well at ALL:

• Puréed asparagus. The addition of salt and lemon juice did not increase its appeal (at least not to Soren; I on the other hand finished it off).

• Puréed eggplant + romano

• Purée of carrots/orange bell pepper/zucchini. He likes carrots & zucchini, so the bell pepper must have thrown him off. But it has tons of vitamin C!

• Puréed strawberries + blueberries + blackberries. I am pretty sure he just disliked all the seeds. I guess I'll purchase these in baby food jars from now on, and someone else can filter out all those minute seeds. That's worth 79 cents of my time, for sure.

And a lukewarm reception went to:

• Puréed apples & strawberry + amaranth. But he is going to have to get used to amaranth, because it's a complete protein which is hard to come by in a vegetarian source.

Here's what we've got on deck for the next couple of days--hopefully he likes it all:



• Swiss chard puréed with chicken stock + ground baked potato skins (it's GOOD!)

• Mashed baked potato + cheddar (to be mixed with puréed broccoli or something similar)

• Polenta + fresh mozzarella

• Baked sweet potato mashed with cheddar

• Chard (to be added to quinoa or amaranth)

I'll keep track of his favorite recipes for anyone out there who might be interested in well-received baby meals.

Soren loves YOU!

Thursday, February 12, 2009

son's first masterpiece

As Auntie Kim recently pointed out, you can't stick magnets to stainless steel! So Soren's artwork has to go on the side of the fridge (or scotch taped to the front, if you are Kim and seriously want to see photos of Soren first thing).

Voila!

Soren post-painting:

With his BFF Julian:

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Update

It's been so long since the last blog, it's hard to know where to start. Soren is doing lots of fun stuff now! Last night he climbed all the way up the stairs, all by himself. Tommy walked behind him, of course, but Soren did all his own heavy lifting.