Slopsville – The Rice Pudding.
Happy Joe
So I finally got around to making Helen’s rice pudding. Kind of. I thought there was only one way to make rice pudding. So I didn’t think I needed to bother making the arduous trek from the kitchen to the computer (about ten feet) to look up Helen’s recipe. How different could it be from the one on the side of the rice box? That was my first mistake.
My second mistake was to not read the “recipe” all the way to the end. I scanned it, I did. I knew that at the end it said to put the rice pudding in an ovenproof dish and so I happily followed the rest of the instructions. I put the milk in a pan and brought it to the boil. It boiled over. Of course it did. Ignoring the mess, I added the rice and gave it a stir, at which point sheets of burned milk floated to the top. I hoiked them out and threw them in the bin. I stirred. I hoiked. I threw. I started to get a bad feeling. I turned the hob off and shoved the pan to the back of the stove and went off in a huff.
Read MoreSlopsville – Our baby Weaning Diary. Week 11.
Each week, I get a newsletter about what to expect at each stage of my baby’s development. A couple of weeks ago, it included the following:
“Any day now, if she hasn’t already, your baby may try feeding herself.”
Any day now? Joe’s been doing it for months! Months! Trying, I mean. He’s only actually succeeded in the last couple of weeks, but he’s been failing at it for ages.
I think he sees it as a great way to combine his two favourite things: eating and making a mess. Yes, he’s happy for me to feed him, but I generally manage to get the food into his mouth, whereas, I imagine he thinks that if he does it himself he could shove it in his ear, throw it on the floor… the possibilities are endless!
But he’s not unaware that if he sticks the food in his ear, he’s not actually getting to eat it, so he certainly wouldn’t
Read MoreSlopsville – Our Baby Weaning Diary – Week Ten
A couple of weeks ago, I was send a baby food kit for review. It included a hand blender. Now we bought a hand blender when we had Harry and it was rubbish. It didn’t seem to blend the food, rather it just rearranged it. But this one – wow. From ‘proper’ grown-up food to baby slop in seconds. (That’s not the review by the way, I’ll be writing a proper review on the main site.)
The first time I used it was on spaghetti bolognaise. Joe loved it, but, more importantly as far as I was concerned, was that I made it with the spag bol leftovers that, in the past, would have gone in the bin. (Or been scoffed by me during the traditional 9pm ‘what can I eat NOW’ hunt.)
So now, as David carries the dinner plates back into the kitchen, I am heard to call, “Don’t throw anything away! Joe can have it!”
I should probably pause here to say that I don’t think I’m supposed to feed Joe other people’s leftovers in the same way you’re supposed to throw the rest of the pot away if your baby’s only eaten some (because, according to my health visitor, it will have been “contaminated by his salaver” [pronounced like palaver]), but I mean, really? What about the waste? Joe likes to chew Harry’s feet, I don’t think we need to worry about his own “salaver”.
So last night we had a roast dinner. I couldn’t quite finish mine (yeah, okay, I left half a parsnip) and so, along with the extra carrot and potato David had prepared and some chicken Harry didn’t want, Joe had one-pot roast dinner for his lunch and will be having the same for his tea.
Frankly, it’s a revelation. The trouble is, it’s addictive. I’ve started looking at everything with an eye to mushing it for Joe. Half a bowl of Cheerios? It could work. Pizza? Why not? Sandwiches? Would probably be disgusting, but in for a penny..!
I admit, I’m exaggerating for comic effect. (I ate the leftover pizza. Obviously.), but it’s still great fun. It’s like having a dog. Or a composter. Maybe I should start putting Joe’s dirty nappies on the garden. No?
Keris Stainton
http://www.keris-stainton.com
http://www.fiveminutespeace.co.uk
Slopsville – Our baby weaning diary. Week Nine. ish.
Have you seen the episode of Friends in which Joey goes out on a date and gets upset with the woman because she takes chips off his plate? He explains his horror by repeating, “Joey doesn’t share food!” Well, my Joe (I’m not calling him ‘Joey’ even for the purposes of this story, sorry) doesn’t share food either.
Like Joey Tribbiani, Joe will happily, enthusiastically, insistently share other people’s food – going so far as to snatch it out of your mouth – but woe betide you if you try and take his.
But, I hear you cry, why would you take food from a baby?
Read MoreSlopsville – our baby weaning diary. Week Eight.
It probably won’t come as a shock to you that Joe is a messy eater. You’ve seen his picture. And babies aren’t exactly known for their table manners anyway, are they? But Joe takes messy eating to the next level. He dials messy eating up to 11. He laughs in the face of messy eating and then hurls it down the front of my top.
Harry was a messy eater too, of course. I’ve got the traditional pictures of his face smeared with yoghurt, his fingers covered in chocolate, but Joe get his food all over his face, his hands, his clothes, the highchair, the floor and any nearby (and not so nearby – the kid’s got some reach) toys. I have picked partially chewed rice cake out of his ears, his nose, his nappy and my bra. Almost everything in the lounge has a light crusting of Weetabix (which, as any parent knows, is one of the world’s most adhesive substances).
Read MoreSlopsville – our baby weaning diary. Week Seven.
We got in from a long day visiting family (including my dad in hospital). Joe had barely slept all day (and Joe usually sleeps for at least – at LEAST – four hours a day) so I wanted to get him to bed fairly swiftly, but he also needed to eat something.
The previous day, he’d had some mixed berries that I’d mixed with some of his cereal. And he’d loved it. So we made it for him again and he wolfed it down. I kept him up a little longer to give it time to digest. He got the hiccups. Once the hiccups had gone, I popped him in bed and all was quiet.
“Bless,” David said, “he was so tired.” And then he went to check on Joe and I heard a plaintive cry (from David, not Joe).
Read MoreSlopsville – our baby weaning diary. Week Six.
What do kippers, papaya, Kitkats, mashed potato, tuna, mango, yoghurt, broccoli, Weetabix, toast, cheese, peaches, salmon, scrambled egg, Philadelphia, and chocolate Buttons have in common? No, that’s not my hangover diet (well, take away the fruit/veg, add a packet of Boasters and fourteen cups of tea and it is, actually), it’s a list of the foods seven-month-old Joe has tried in the past couple of weeks.
I’m not ashamed to admit I’d started to fret about the fact that I hadn’t really cooked anything for Joe. Okay, I hadn’t *cooked* anything for him at all. I had mashed some fruit and… that was all. Joe and I were both perfectly happy with the fresh fruit combined with the Organix pots and packets (and breastfeeding), but I knew that I had to cook something sometime. But what..?
And then I was sent an Annabel Karmel book in which the author pointed out that, at Joe’s age, he could pretty much eat anything the rest of us humans eat. It was a revelation! Scrambled eggs? Had never occurred to me! Yoghurt? I thought he had to be one before he could have cows’ milk (turns out you have to be one to drink it, but can cook with it sooner). Toast? But, um, he hasn’t got any teeth.
Read MoreSlopsville – Our Baby Weaning Diary. Week Five.
This week I’d been planning on writing about all the many and varied foods Joe has tried, but then we went away for a week and I found something else to write about…
On the way home, we’d planned to stop and visit some friends and this meant we had to take the M25. Yes, I know. We got on to the M25. We saw a sign. There was a broken down vehicle and traffic was backed up from where we just got on… to where we planned to get off. Cheers, Sod and your stupid law. The signs said 40, but the traffic was going much, much slower. Thankfully, both boys were asleep. To begin with.
Harry woke first, saying, sleepily, “Are we there?” Then Joe woke,
Read MoreSlopsville – Our Baby Weaning Diary. Week Four.
In Catherine Newman’s gorgeous book Waiting for Birdy (if you haven’t read it, get hold of a copy as soon as you feasibly can, seriously), she describes an occasion when her young son, Ben, choked on a “Lifesaver” (that’s a Polo to us Brits). She writes that Ben was less worried about choking and more that his mother would never give him a Lifesaver again. “Indeed,” she says, “I never will.” 
I was the same the first time I gave my eldest son, Harry, an apple. Even though he was quite old and the apple was chopped into teeny pieces, he still choked. And he’d been enjoying it so much that, even as he was choking, he was opening his mouth and reaching for more apple. “Not likely, buddy,” I thought after the partialy digested apple had shot out of his mouth and across the room. “You can eat apple when you’re living under your own roof, not mine.”
Read MoreSlopsville – Our Baby Weaning Diary. Week Three.
I said I was going to write about cooking (sorry, to be completely truthful, that should be “cooking”) this week, didn’t I, but first an update.
The pooing may be coming under control. Now we’re looking at once, maybe twice, a day and Joe hasn’t woken up dirty in the night for a few nights. He’s still waking up between 4 and 4.30am which is a pain, but whaddaya gonna do?
I’ll tell you what his father wants to do. He wants Joe to go into his own room. Despite the fact that Harry went into his own room (very happily) at four months, I don’t want Joe to go. Harry was a very noisy sleeper and Joe barely makes a sound. But it’s not just that. I want him to stay with me. He seems much more of a baby to me than
Read MoreSlopsville – Our Baby Weaning Diary. Week Two.
This week I thought I’d write less about what I’m putting into Joe and more about what’s coming out. Because it’s been a terrible shock to the system. Mine, I mean, not his. Although presumably his too.
You see, Joe has been pretty much exclusively breastfed for six months and, like many breastfed babies, has not bothered much with the pooing, going less than once a week. Apparently this is normal. So my midwife told me anyway.
And that’s been great. We haven’t been overwhelmed with nappies, haven’t had any of those just got him dressed, left the house, exploding nappy, desperate dash home incidents that were so prevalent with his formula-fed older brother (the first time I put Harry in a baby carrier he pooed so extravagantly the carrier had to be binned), that is until I started weaning.
Now he poos all the time. Like five times a day. And during the night. He had been sleeping through (well, until 5am, which I don’t exactly consider through, but theoretically it is), but now he’s waking with a dirty nappy, sometimes more than once (last night it was 1am and 4.30am). And he wakes up in a panic, presumably because he too is unused to the unpleasant sensation of sleeping in his own, er, mess.
But then, because he’s a greedy urchin, he obviously thinks he’s woken up for food and so this panics him too and he can’t decide which need is the more urgent. So it goes something like, “ARGH! MY NAPPY! IT BURNS! GET IT OFF, GET IT OFF, GET IT OFF!” I start dealing with the nappy. “WOMAN!! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? I’M STARVING! FEED ME! FEED ME NOW! NOW, NOW, NOW!”
Woken from a deep sleep, I’m generally still trying to work out which end is up and Joe is melting down. I’ve actually seriously considered waking my husband and getting him to change Joe’s nappy WHILE I feed him. Last night I went for changing him first and his panicked wails woke Harry. (I did indeed wake my husband to go and deal with *him*.)
That aside, Joe is still enjoying scoffing and I’m still trying to get him into some sort of routine and actually cook something for him. So far, I’ve only managed to “make” him banana and kiwi fruit and tried and failed a carrot mash (how can you fail at mashing a carrot? Tune in next week!). He’s still loving the Organix stuff, the Banana Porridge and Summer Pudding being the particular ones he eats the way I eat crispy seaweed or Maltesers (i.e. with abandon. And unpleasant sounds. And mess).
Right. Better go. I’ve got a nappy to change.
by Keris Stainton
www.keris-stainton.com
Slopsville is sponsored by Organix – great taste and simple, honest goodness.
Slopsville – Our Baby Weaning Diary. Week One.
I’ve read many times that one of the first signs of a baby being ready for solid food is when they watch your fork travelling from meal to mouth. My son, Joe, was doing that in hospital the day after he was born.
After breastfeeding him (almost exclusively) for five months, I started to accept that I probably couldn’t put off weaning for much longer.
I would never have imagined I would feel emotional about weaning, but standing looking at a box of baby porridge, I found myself welling up… and so put it off for another couple of weeks. But when Joe rolled over and lay gnawing on the leg of the coffee table, I realised I couldn’t put it off any longer.
His first meal, like his older brother’s before him, was
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