Mira's gotten really good at finger foods. As a matter of fact, now that she knows she can feed herself, she's gotten really impatient with anyone else feeding her. If you hold a spoon up to her face, she's more likely to slap at it than to open her mouth. And she pushes things away from her face as a way of clearly indicating what she *does not* prefer. So now I've had to really brainstorm on finger foods. (Let me know if any of you have good suggestions about what makes good finger foods, cuz I need all the ideas I can get.) I think in this video she is eating cantaloupe.
A mom from one of my mom's clubs tipped me off to these sippy cups. They're called Tilty cups, and they are the only brand of sippy cup that Mira can actually do herself. The problem with most sippy cups is that she doesn't tip them up enough to get any water out. But Tilty cups are designed to help with this, so she doesn't have to tip the cup way up in order to drink.
The doctor has opened up her diet to most foods. The only thing she can't eat now is honey, nuts (including peanut butter), and anything too hard/crunchy/sharp for her to gum up. She has some teeth, but no molars for grinding, so all her food has to be relatively soft or something that will dissolve in her mouth or at least cut into pieces small enough to swallow whole. We're also limiting salt and sugar (as in, she can have some foods with small amounts of salt/sugar, but we're not specifically salting her foods or giving her sweets/desserts). She's still not really great with using utensils; she seems to think that their purpose is for banging things rather than for eating... oh well. So anyway, if anyone has ideas for soft finger foods, let me know.
3 comments:
I remember hearing about those tilty cups and thinking they seemed really cool, but never got any. Have you tried her with a straw? Some kids "get it" pretty quickly while others take a while... I forget when D figured out straws, but that's made it a lot easier for drinking, both b/c it eliminates the tilting issue and also straws are that much easier to get any decent amount of liquids out of (my main pet peeve with sippy cups in general-- most make it SO HARD to actually get anything out of!).
I'll try to brainstorm today to remember what all I fed D while he was in that finger-foods only stage. I know one tip that was REALLY helpful was to use some sort of powder (ground up cheerios, flax seed powder, unmixed baby cereal, whatever) and use that to roll sticky/slippery foods in (so it'd coat the outside of them) to make them easier to pick up. We did that with things like banana and avocado.
Thanks for the suggestions. She has tried a straw, and the only kind she'll actually use are the thick plastic ones that come with sports bottles. The disposable straws are too flimsy and she just ends up chewing on them until nothing will come out. lol
As for the Tilty cups, that's one of the things I like about them, the water seems to come out quite freely. On the other hand, that means that it's not a no-spill cup, so we have other sippy cups for when we're on the go and it's important to not make a mess.
I did try rolling banana in some dry oat cereal one time. She just ended up squishing it between her fingers. Course, that was a while back and she now has better control over the strength of her grip, so maybe I'll try it again.
This might not be an issue w/ Mira, since she eats so much cheese, but I always worried about sufficient protein intake, when you girls didn't yet have the teeth to chew your meat. One thing that I liked was the organic preservative-free hot dogs from Whole Foods (I got them cheaper at Wheatsville Co-op) They come frozen and I would cut them lengthwise into strips. I'm sure they have salt, but they DON'T have a lot of the other bad stuff like nitrates that you normally associate w/ hot dogs.
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