Bigger and better adventures

Time flies when you’re having fun, and Talia certainly seems to be enjoying herself!

In the past month her crawling has reached warp speed and her cruising is also very good. She pulls herself up on just about everything and anything and will walk while holding on with one hand (although she prefers it with two).

She finally realised it was quicker to go down the step backwards than to sit at the top and call for help, and as a result is now able to move all around the house. She’s also applied the going down backwards knowledge to new steps in other locations, which is good, but isn’t too sure what to do when there is more than one step, which is all we have at home.

A big achievement for the last month has been the development of pointing and waving. Her pointy finger is not the most accurate, but it’s getting better, and the waving is a bit sporadic too - but it’s still pretty exciting for us!

We’ve just started the transition to cow’s milk, and that has gone very well. When I first tried giving it to her several months ago she didn’t seem to like it at all, but now she’s very happy to drink it straight from the fridge, and I’m only making up formula first thing in the morning and last bottle of the day (so probably less than 200ml in total) to give her the benefit of the various vitamins etc that are part of the formula.

As far as eating goes, we haven’t really made any great progress. Talia will occasionally eat a small amount of food from a spoon, and sometimes put the spoon in her mouth by herself, but not often. I’ve given her a small amount of food and a spoon and left her to play with it and she hasn’t wanted to actually eat any of it at all. She still loves to eat beef sausage, peas, corn kernels, and beans, plus a bit of pasta and rice. She’s OK with toast for breakfast and will usually eat bread spread with avocado or pate. I had been buying a range of baby snack foods because I was tired of making things she wouldn’t eat, and for a while she was happy with Heinz muesli bars and cheesey breadsticks, but has now abandoned them too. So I’m back to doing a bit of baking and she is currently happy to eat some biscuits and slices I’ve made. Her weight is still around the 10th percentile or just above it, so I’m not at all worried about it, but I wish she would eat a few more “normal baby foods” like fruit or yogurt, neither of which we’ve had success with.

Talia still doesn’t have any real words, but has a fantastic range of babble sounds (used indiscriminately) and will sometimes copy sounds. I took her into a pet shop and showed her some fish in an aquarium, and when I said “fish”, she said “vish”, which was cute. She still makes a noise which could be interpreted as “cat” when she sees our cat, but she uses the same sound at other times when the cat is absent, so I’m not convinced. She hasn’t picked up any more Auslan signs either, and for a while even stopped using the one sign she had started to use (”milk” which she uses to mean “I want it, give it to me”).

In terms of play, she’s discovered the joy of going up and down the slide. She can almost put in a puzzle piece. Of course she still loves her books, especially the ones with flaps. She gets quite excited by new things, or seeing people she hasn’t seen for a bit, and squeals with excitement. She starts a lot of games of peekaboo and can be kept amused for ages if you have the stamina to keep playing!

We have fully transitioned to one sleep per day. Unfortunately it’s not particularly long - an hour or an hour and a half if I’m lucky. But it seems to be enough to get her through the rest of the day, and if she is too tired then we just put her to bed by 7pm instead of the usual 7:30pm. For a while she was getting very upset about going to bed and crying so much she threw up, but now I put her in sitting down and it seems to be better - she can still get upset sometimes but it’s harder to throw up.

She can also be quite difficult when I’m trying to change her nappy or get her dressed/undressed, but I’ve managed to stop it getting out of hand. I have a change table toy which she doesn’t play with elsewhere, and that is often enough to distract her. I also try to change her clothes while she’s standing up, as that seems to be less distressing to her.

And just a few stats: 9.03 kg; 72.0cm long; head circumference of 47cm … and 11 teeth

Talia has been doing very well eating only finger food, but at some point she will need to graduate to cutlery.  I decided it’s time I relaxed enough to let her practice using a spoon and not stress if it goes everywhere. She’s been putting a toothbrush into her mouth for the last week or two, and I figured a spoon shouldn’t be any more difficult.

So on Friday I let her loose with 2 spoons and a limited amount of yogurt in one of those suction-cup bowls. And it went really well! I was helping her load up the spoons, but she was putting them in her mouth herself (she really doesn’t like me trying to do it) and a surprising amount of yogurt actually went in and stayed in.

The next morning I tried the same thing and she threw the spoons on the floor - yogurt-o-rama!  Fortunately our sealed cork floors are very forgiving and easy to clean. Then in the evening we visited my parents, and I shared some dessert with Talia by passing small spoonfuls of icecream and lemon pudding, and she did a much better job.  (If you’re reading this Mum, please email me the recipe, it was delicious!)  

So I think we’ll be doing spoon training every day or two until she gets the hang of it, although I think the challenge will be more the food than the spoon!

First, the good news: we’ve broken the 8kg barrier! Talia weighed in at 8.165kg this morning. She is 14.5 months (11.5 months corrected). It has taken her 3 months to put on this most recent kilogram, which is exactly how long it took her to put on her first kilogram after leaving hospital. Fortunately, although not without it’s challenges, these past three months have not been anywhere near as stressful as those first three months.

It has been ages since I posted about what Talia is eating, and I’m sure to forget if I don’t write it down. Since the Great Spoon Strike began in April, I’ve had to come up with a wide range of finger food to cater to Little Miss Picky’s culinary whims. Food can now be categorised as follows:

Almost always acceptable as food and eaten regularly: avocado, beef sausage, dates, cooked veges (peas, mushroom, carrot, potato, sweet potato, celery), yogurt coated sultanas, fish (usually served crumbed)

Might be eaten, might not, depends on the day and there’s no way of telling in advance:
Part A (slightly more likely) omelette, pikelets, cheerios, sultanas, rice, meatball, matzah ball, muffin, pasta, red & white beans, corn, capsicum, grapes, chicken, biscuit
Part B (slightly less likely) cheese, banana, pumpkin, dried apricot, apple, rice cracker

Was a hit but we don’t dish it up every day: sushi, cake, prawn, cheesecake, hot chips, smoked salmon

Used to be popular but not at the moment: wholemeal toast (spread with avocado or peanut butter), fruit toast (spread with butter), cruskits (without or without avocado)

Oh seriously, there is no way I am going to eat that: mandarin, strawberry, anything on a spoon (eg weetbix, yogurt)

Things we haven’t fed her yet: chocolate, ice cream, jelly, tomato, salad greens

Daddyfeatures suggested we rename Talia “John West”, in keeping with the quantity of food being rejected at the moment.

There is a lot of discussion on the forum about how to deal with babies who don’t want to eat.  Some mothers see it as a fight but we are pretty determined not to take that path.  Some mothers are concerned about feeding disorders but I think our issues are merely a combination of small appetite (not much we can do about that), teething (ditto) and early onset of rampant I’ll-do-it-my-way individualism (no comment really!!)

I decided today I would take before and after photos, as Talia has been doing some impressive rearranging and redistribution of food from highchair tray to floor.  So I laid out and photographed a beautiful little bento box of nibblies in an ice cube tray and put it on the high chair. And do you know what? The little imp either ate the contents or left it exactly where it was. Out of the entire spread she dropped a single cheerio over the edge. So there was no aftermath to photograph.

Some days I swear she must be able to read my mind.

Since she figured out solids at the end of last year, Talia has been fantastic, eating all sorts of homecooked meat and veg.  She had started to catch up with her weight and all was going well… until now.

A week or maybe a little longer ago, she started objecting to receiving food on a spoon, pushing it away with her hands and turning her head to the side.  With a bit of ingenuity (”say aaah Talia!”) I could get a spoonful in, and after carefully digesting this first mouthful with all the seriousness of a wine connoisseur judging expensive shiraz (up to but not including the spitting out stage), she would then allow me to feed her the rest of the meal.

I thought I had it all under control until the beginning of this week, when she decided that not even the first spoonful would be considered acceptable, under any circumstances.  It has been very difficult to deal with, as I don’t want mealtimes to be a fight, but I can’t let her go without a healthy diet.  It’s not that she won’t eat - just that she won’t allow herself to be fed.  It wouldn’t matter so much if she was older and able to use a spoon, but at the moment she will only accept a limited range of finger foods - and they are subject to change without warning.  Savoury pikelets were a hit on Tuesday but thrown out of the high chair on Wednesday.  Raisin toast has come back into favour, as have avocado finger sandwiches, but baked ricotta is now out and her acceptance of random veges appears to depend entirely on her mood, the phase of the moon and whether or not the wind is blowing from the west.

This is the sort of point where you realise that being a mother is a full time job and then some.

The bottom drawer of our freezer (we have an “upside-down” fridge) belongs to Talia. It’s full of plastic tubs containing ice-cube-sized portions of stewed fruit, mashed veg, pulverised chicken, flakes of fish in cheese sauce etc. Wedged in the middle of this oyster of solids was a little pearl - the last remaining bottle of my frozen expressed breast milk (EBM).

I’ve rambled at length about the ups and downs of milk production. It wasn’t easy, but it was worth it. I wanted to do more, but now I’m happy that I did as much as I could. If I had to do it all over again, I would. So what’s the story with this bottle of EBM? Talia stopped breastfeeding exclusively last October, and ceased completely at the end of January. It’s now the end of March. This bottle of liquid gold was dated 21/6/07 - the day before Talia came home from hospital. This bottle of milk has reigned, happy and glorious, over the bottom drawer of the freezer for NINE months, as one by one all the other bottles (older) and baggies (younger) of EBM were defrosted and used up. (Don’t worry, my freezer is cold enough that it was safe to keep it longer than the usually recommended three months). This bottle was a testament to my hours of expressing but also a life-line which I had clung to for months in case of emergency, but which was no longer needed now that Talia is healthy and happy with formula and solids.

So two days ago, a week after Talia’s first birthday, I liberated this vintage bottle from its cryogenic home and defrosted it. Today Talia has been drinking half formula, half EBM, the final instalment of my first gift to her. It doesn’t usually happen, but today she completely finished every bottle. Tonight we will both go to sleep satisfied.

Well the candle has been blown out, the cake has been shared and the balloons are slowly deflating.  It has been an emotional but ultimately very joyful (if slightly fattening) week-long celebration.  I’m in awe of my amazing little daughter who is developing before my eyes, and so thankful for my husband and parents and their support.

It’s mid-evening, March 17.

This time last year I was lying on a hospital bed in a delivery room, two monitors strapped across my belly and a machine next to me like a seismograph printing out the magnitude of my labour tremors.  I think my legs were probably trembling just as badly, they certainly felt like jelly earlier in the evening when the head of the obstetrics department told me I could be having a baby within hours.  I was really, really frightened, and hoping against hope that the medication they had given me would stop my labour so I could go home until my baby was actually big enough to be born properly.

Tonight I baked sesame shortbreads for Talia’s birthday on Thursday, and read a lot of chatter posted by other premmie mothers who I now think of as friends, even though I’ve met almost none of them in person.  Things didn’t go to plan last year, but thankfully, like the best sort of stories, it seems to have all turned out OK.

Today I made my first batch of chocolate crackles!
Talia supervised from the Bumbo seat on the kitchen counter, and even licked the spoon.
I feel ridiculously pleased with myself for this not-particularly-difficult achievement.

It was almost as exciting as the fact that *drumroll* Talia cut her first tooth yesterday!  Woo hoo!  Just in time for her first birthday.

Adam Gilchrist isn’t the only big retirement of the season; my boobs have definitely played their last Test for Australia too. Talia is pleased to see them - but only for about a minute each side, and only before breakfast. After that there is plenty of smiles and giggles but no more sucking.

So here for the record is our last breastfeeding song, to the tune of Old MacDonald.

Young Miss Talia had a mum, e-i-e-i-o
And on that mum she had a boob, e-i-e-i-o
With a suck, suck here and a slurp, slurp here
Here a suck there a slurp, everywhere a suck and slurp
Young Miss Talia had a mum, e-i-e-i-o

I don’t feel the urge to sing while she’s bottle feeding - and these days I make up a bottle and hand it to Talia who holds it with both hands and feeds herself. Clever cherub!

New foods since last week: lentils, spinach, parsnip, fish