First baby food!

Today, coincidentally 6 months exactly after we brought her home, Libby tried her first baby food! She's 7.5 months old but we waited this long 1. to be 6 months past her due date and 2. because she didn't even start full feeds in her mouth til she was nearly at her due date. So we wanted to give her the full 6 months of exclusive breastfeeding benefit if we could. As we got closer and closer to this date, my desire to give her baby food has not been that strong. I have LOVED having her as a baby and I have LOVED nursing her. It is so much more special because I had to wait 7 long weeks for it (to nurse her and to have her home with us). So putting baby food off was easy because I wanted to keep her a little baby as long as I could. But it's become fairly clear she's ready for food. She is quite grabby whenever we are eating and she has just seemed like she would like a taste of things.

Initially I really wanted to try starting her on table food. It's a long explanation of how it works, but basically you start her off on little pieces of soft food. This is supposed to keep your baby breastfeeding longer because you aren't giving her wet food so her thirst is always satisfied by the breast and you are letting her choose if she wants to eat the food or not (ie, you just put some in front of her at meal times and she can eat it if she wants or not). Well, about 2 weeks ago I put a piece of very soft potato in her mouth. Granted, I didn't let her do it herself. I didn't wait as long as I was supposed to so I wasn't following the program to the letter. But when I put it in her mouth she just sort of sat there with it in there. I got really scared that she'd choke so I decided I'd rather just stick with what I know and spoon feed her purees like I have for all my babies.

Today I blended up some organic bananas and added in some thawed breastmilk and fed it to her. She loved it! She very quickly learned to open her mouth-about 2 bites-and you could tell she just loved it. She struggled with swallowing it properly-she did several trials and errors of spitting it out or holding it in her mouth but by the end of the feeding you could tell she had gotten the jist. And afterwards, she was a S.M.I.L.E.Y. baby! I'm so happy she liked her first baby food!

Bite...

...and what do I do with this?

Very happy girl!