Food 101

Go back with me in time 1 month ago and pretend Emerson was just eating food for the first time and you wanted to hear all about how it went.  It's taken us about a month to learn how to eat, so it's really more appropriate than not that it took me this long to blog and post about it!  Emerson LOVED chewing on the spoon, but the fist time she ate rice cereal, she wasn't totally sure what she thought of it.  She didn't seem to not like the flavor, she just wasn't really associating that opening her mouth equated in getting food.  So lots of it ended up lots of places other than her mouth.

[Oh hello big picture - haven't tried this yet since the new formatting lets you upload pictures in XL fashion!]

So after about 2 weeks of eating twice a day...the sweet girl still hadn't gotten it.  Poor Emerson that her mother is a pediatric therapist that specializes in feeding...poor, poor Emerson.  Wait, what am I talking about - POOR, POOR ME!  This was super stressing me out.  I was stressed every time I fed her, and for like 20 minutes before and afterwards.  Just ask Terry.  And in the meantime, be thankful that Beth fed her a lot during the week and her report was always that she 'did great.'  Again, praise the Lord for Beth.  So not to worry, of course I asked a speech therapist I work with about it, who of course told me she was fine but to just keep working on it and she would get it.  And one weekend, she did.  She just got it.  The mantra in my head when I was stressed is exactly what I tell families all the time, as I have been taught: "Variety=quantity, variety=quantity, variety=quantity."  And it worked.  Imagine that!

So the rice cereal was fine, whatever, I spiced it up with cinnamon, switched over to oatmeal, kept spicing it up, tried it bland, but the real fun started when the real food started.  We were having roasted sweet potatoes for dinner, so Emerson did too.  We were having green beans for dinner, so Emerson did too.  The sweet potatoes (with nutmeg and cinnamon) were a breeze, but the green beans...well not so much.  I thought I had done my due diligence in reading about how to 'best' make them, but I had no idea how hard it would really be to puree the shells.  It might have something to do with how old my blender is.  But don't worry, I tried the food processer, blender, and immersion blender - just to be thorough.

All this turned into these tiny little pods (which were a total rip of and waste of money - have switched to ice cube trays) - way to think you needed something fancy at first just to be proved wrong Ellen, K.I.S.S! [remember this acronym??]

If I had remembered it, maybe my kitchen sink wouldn't have looked like THIS the first cooking process:

I know, I can't believe I'm showing you this either.  But really, I'm just showing you so that I can tell you it's gotten much easier, cleaner, and efficient. 

And since, we have made & eaten: sweet potatoes, green beans, avocado, butternut squash, carrots, pumpkin, strawberries, blueberries, pear, apple, apricots, prune juice, watermelon and 3 bites of icecream :)  Now she opens her mouth and chows down like a champ - hooray Em!

More on the ice cream and visit with Molly & Bella later.  But before that you'll get to hear all about our trip to California!

[I'm kind of loving these new huge pictures.  Please tell me if they are obnoxious!]