Eat, Poop, Read

Ila has become a book aficionado in the last several weeks. Okay, admittedly, she's loved books for a while but mostly as a chew toys. Now she's actually into the stories and pictures and turning the pages and hearing the animal sounds and petting the furry patches on the "Touch & Feel" books... In other words, books have gone from a digestive delight to a more cerebral one. Okay, she'll still nibble a corner if you let her. Paper products of all kinds are a favorite snack of hers, after all. It was amazing to watch this transformation. One day, she was still a squiggly little bundle with absolutely no interest in what you were doing while you tried to read her night time stories...then, all of a sudden, she was laughing and screeching and cooing at the pictures. It's sort of alarming how completely babies can change, seemingly overnight.



Another bizarrely fast adaptation our little one made recently is pooping and peeing on a potty. We've been just putting her on the toilet with a cute "toilet seat reducer" four or five times a day - and, surprisingly, she often goes to the bathroom there. I know a number of parents who are really into the whole "elimination communication"/diaper free baby business. I was intrigued by it but had about as much motivation to try it with Ila as I had to, say, jump out of airplane when she was a newborn. Some folks do it that young, apparently with success. I was too exhausted and totally bewildered to add anything like that to the mix. Still, I thought about trying it as she got older, but I really hadn't gotten around to it. Then, at the end of January, our diaper service went out of business and, to be perfectly honest, the thought of dealing with lots of poopy cloth diapers and a gray water system provided the needed motivation. She pooped on the potty the second time I set her on it. Crazy. She still pees and poops occasionally in her diaper, but she goes a lot on the toilet. And she just started did it - bam! I find it a little strange that she would get it so instantly, but I guess babies are more cued into these things than I give them credit for...

Along these follow-the-lead-of-the-baby ridiculous hippie-style parenting lines, we've been doing this "baby-led weaning" strategy for introducing solid foods. Contrary to what the name of this method would lead you to believe, this approach has little to do with weaning. Right at the start, the authors of the book (called Baby Led Weaning) explain that if you take this route, your child really should be able to breast feed on demand for as long as they need to, probably well into their second year of life, at least. I understand why they chose this name - you introduce solids and get your baby off the breast all in their time - baby-led! But I think the choice to put "weaning" in the title of a method that has no real weaning goal is odd. Okay, I guess there's a weaning method, but it's not really an objective in any concrete way.

Maybe the name puts me off because, at this point, I don't really care about weaning. Really, I sometimes think I could do the whole crazy breast feed until the baby is like five. If you are lucky enough to not have to pump and you're past the first month of nipple torture, breast feeding is pretty darn awesome. Even in the middle of the night I sort of love it. I roll over and she latches on. It's awesome choreography. Or, we're like the mother-ship and the little satellite ship coming to dock. Really, that's what I think about at 2 AM. Almost every night. Why? Maybe I watched Star Wars or The Next Generation too much as a young person.

Anyway, the main idea of baby-led weaning, however stupidly named, is that you introduce solids that your baby can hold onto, manipulate, and feed to themselves, instead of spoon-feeding them only purees. We do still feed soft and gooey foods to her with a spoon, but she loves to be in charge of her own food. It's fairly interesting and has gone pretty well. She gags occasionally, and I have fleeting fears of her choking. This often happens when she's eating a totally mushy, non-choke-causing food like yams. Though nerve-wracking, I guess that's all pretty normal for the beginning of eating. Whenever anything more than a pea-sized amount of food - say hummus - gets into her mouth, she'll often gag. I guess this is a reflex to keep babies from choking, but it also makes for a lovely meal time sound track.

Despite the gagging, she was totally fascinated by food from the beginning, but, in the last two weeks, she seems to actually want to eat, not just taste and play with food. Like with the books, it's like a switch has been flipped. Before, food was interesting; now it appetizing. Her little pincer grip - the ability to grab with index and thumb - has markedly improved recently, too. This makes the whole eating thing a little more engaging and workable for her as well! She's still wildly clumsy with food - and sometimes when she's worked so hard to get the bit of food in her little fingers and then drops it right as she's trying to put it in her moth, I feel so sorry for her. Really, I almost start crying a little. Needless to say, she doesn't care at all. In fact, it seems kind of fun for her as she works on her hand coordination. All I can think of, though, is serious accident victims learning to feed themselves again in some grueling physical therapy situation.


Other than our more routine daily adventures, we did have a real life International Traveling Adventure. Actually, there wasn't too much adventure in our venture...just long traveling days to Belize for our dear friends' lovely wedding. Ila's interest in books was a blessing on our flights. Although Kiyomi and I got a little tired of reading Where Does Maisy Live? after the hundredth time. Still, Ila was, all in all, a real traveling champ during her first international trip. She loved the water, the sand - especially eating the sand - all the new people, pineapple and riding on Kiyomi's back on a bike. Yeah, this was the dare-devilry of our trip. There wasn't a baby bike helmet to be had on the island, apparently. We felt a bit guilty, but it was so fun to be able to ride with her. I rationalized it by telling myself there aren't any cars on the island and not even any pavement - just packed sand. Plus, everybody else was doing it!

Well, it all worked out without incident, fortunately. It was so lovely just to hang out - the three of us - without any work to do. Just eating, riding around the island, going to the beach, seeing our friends, putting Ila on the potty now and then, reading Maisy books over and over. I'm not quite sure why I'm not always on vacation.