Food, Glorious Fooooood!

Ha.  No, don't worry, nothing I've cooked recently.

Instead, it's News for the Day!

The Frog has had his first official taste of solids.  Hubs had polished off most of his apple, and proffered the chunky core to the Frog, who had spent the entire evening filling his mouth with a whole range of unappetising objects.  He pulled the apple to his mouth with the same enthusiasm he'd had for virtually everything else, but once he'd got it in - holy smokes! taste explosm!  He drowned the apple with dribble, and mumbled it about with such enthusiasm that Hubs decided he wasn't hungry enough to take the last couple of bites after all.

And he cried when we took it away - though fortunately he was placated with some formula soon after, ending my brief nightmare scenario of having to put him to bed with interminable spoonfuls of mushy apple.

However - mushy apple may be a thing of the past, anyway.  I'm not sure if you've heard of baby-lead weaning, but it's been promoted around here as the latest way to start your child on solids.  At just under 5 months, and needing a lot of help just to sit, I won't say the Frog is ready to do more than lick at something for its taste, but from the information I've been given this is pretty much the way it works.  Babies start by just licking and sucking and tasting, and actually ingesting very little.  As their digestive tract matures (including their ability to chew, and move food from the front to the back of their mouth), they take in more and more of the food they're given, until they're firmly on solids.  I suppose with this method you have a lot of wastage (unless you're happy eating up all the half sucked broccoli florets and mushy well-gummed carrot fingers), but you're also saving a lot of effort by not having to puree all foods to a fine mush before spooning it in.   Apparently there's also no more danger of babies choking when fed this way than when fed mushy foods, provided:

1. you let them feed themselves, and 
2. you don't give them anything silly, like peanuts.

That said, I have gone and done a baby CPR course, with a side-focus on choking - just to be on the safe side.  It wasn't bad - though there's a deal of difference between man-handling a half-kilo 'choking' baby dummy and a 7 kg wriggling critter  (no, I didn't practice back-strikes or chest compressions on the Frog, though he watched me gleefully as I pounded on the dummy to clear its airway).

Things to take home from CPR: the chest compression component should be done at about 100 compressions/minute.  Apparently this is about the same beat you get in  "Stayin' Alive" by the BeeGees.  Which is fine, except when you get so caught up in the chorus you forget to count and miss the breathing part entirely.  Dang.  Now I have that song in my head ...  

haa haa haa haa stayin' alive, stayin' alive ...