Leila Rose Petal

Hanging out on Wednesday morning by Nicky P

Feeding Leila mushed up food has been a bit hit and miss. Although she seems to like most things I’ve offered her (yoghurt being a notable exception - it made her chuck massively) actually getting the spoon in her mouth has been a huge battle. Her tongue just kept getting in the way and she appeared to want to lick the spoon rather than actually take the food off it - if that makes sense. But we had a little bit of a breakthrough in the last couple of days.

Like any baby she shoves anything she gets hold of into her mouth and she’s become very fond of chewing on rusks. The other night I let her grab the spoon and pull it into her mouth herself. She did that for most of the meal and it seems like the penny dropped. You open your mouth, the spoon goes in and it deposits food in there!. All you need to do is swallow the stuff! Who knew it was that easy!

Just now I gave her some Heinz meat and veg mush (I will cook stuff for her myself when she’s eating reliably enough for it to be worth the effort) and it went down a treat. She grabbed the spoon and put it in her mouth once and after that was happy to just open up and let me shovel the food in for her. When she’d had enough she put her hand up and pushed the spoon away.

I dare say there’ll be more challenges to getting her eating real food, but for now I’m really happy with this little triumph. I was very sick of fighting with her tongue.