Baby led win

You might remember that we had a lot of trouble getting Carina to eat enough early on. She started out chunky but when I first returned to work back in May of 2011, she went on a bottle strike, thinned out, and never recovered. She still probably doesn't eat as much as she should.

I'm sure you can imagine that we want to do our best to avoid a food battle with Aurelia, so we were a little disheartened when we gave her her first bite -- roasted sweet potato puree -- and she gagged and drooled and spit it all out. She either didn't like it, or didn't appreciate being spoon fed...or both.

So, we tried something else. Many of my friends have been successful with baby led weaning so I did a little reading and figured it wouldn't hurt to give it a try. Baby Led Weaning simply means letting your child feed him/herself from the beginning. No spoon-feeding purees or rice cereal. "Weaning" in this sense doesn't mean stopping breastfeeding, it is referring to the British word which means "adding complementary foods". You give baby small pieces of food and let them have at it. We were a little nervous at first that she would choke, but she's done unbelievably well.

Aurelia at just over 7 Months is already eating better, and more foods, than Carina was at 1. She's had toast, sweet potato, avocado, rigatoni, pastina (re: last two, we're Italian, so they're two separate categories), cucumber, banana, applesauce, apples, yogurt (which she feeds herself), cheddar cheese, mozzarella cheese, American cheese (can you tell we like cheese?), pancakes, mango, hot dog (the fancy nitrate-free kind), and puffs. And I just might have let her try her first {very tiny} taste of cupcake today ;)

Sure, it's messy, but she loves feeding herself and it let's us eat our own meals while she eats hers. I wish we had gone this route with Carina. No stress. No fuss. Just happy well-fed baby.

Since returning to work, she has rebelled against the bottle just like Carina did, but after a suggestion from a reader (thanks!) we tried sippy cups and it's actually working pretty well! I guess we'll just skip the bottles altogether. And with how great of an eater she is? I'm not worried at all :)

Has anyone else tried baby led weaning? How did it go for you?

Not out of the woods yet

I mentioned a few weeks ago that we were taking Carina to see a Nutritionist and for a follow-up with the Pediatric Nephrologist.

The good news: the Nutritionist took a look at our daily food journals and told us that we are feeding her all the right things. She is eating a balanced diet, we just need to keep at it in terms of getting her to eat more of it. And? The blood work that we had done for the 3rd time (1st two values were abnormal) was normal! Her CO2 level was just fine this time around.

The blah news: the Nephrologist also ordered a blood gas test, which came back with a low blood pH. So, he doesn't feel comfortable ruling out Renal Tubular Acidosis (RTA) quite yet. He wants to see us again in September and if she doesn't have significant weight gain by then, he wants to try putting her on sodium bicarbonate (the treatment for RTA) to see if her growth improves.

I was hoping that her eating would improve upon weaning her a few weeks ago. So far, it's hard to tell. She is drinking more milk for sure, but we don't yet know if she is making any progress. Maybe I'll bring her down the hall to the Pediatrician for a weight check when I'm at the clinic for my OB appointment next Wednesday.

So I guess we'll see. Of course I don't want anything to be wrong with her, but if there is, we'd like to get her on the right path as soon as possible.

Carina's new big kid cup - Philips AVENT Natural Drinking Cup Review & Giveaway! CLOSED

We just hit 500,000 lifetime pageviews on the blog! Thank you so much for reading, everyone! To celebrate, I'm kicking off a week of giveaways :)

With all of Carina's feeding and weight gain issues, we have really been struggling to find a way to get her to drink more cow's milk. She does okay with traditional sippy and straw cups, but to our frustration she just never drinks enough. When Philips AVENT told me about their new Natural Drinking Cup for toddlers 12 months and up, I knew we needed to give it a try!

The BPA free Natural Drinking Cup is truly unique; it is a spoutless and strawless transition cup for growing toddlers. The cup helps your little one easily move from sippy cups to grown up drinking, without the mess. The unique spill proof valve is activated once it touches your toddler's lips, and allows effortless drinking from all around the rim - just like an adult cup. There is no need to suck! (lol?) It holds 260 mL of liquid, or almost 9 ounces.

Verdict? Carina LOVES this cup. She clamors for it and tosses her sippy aside in favor of it if we happen to have both within her reach. She really seems to enjoy drinking from it. When she brings it down from her mouth she is always smiling; it's the cutest thing. We have found the cup itself to be quite spill proof, but unfortunately she has figured out how to activate the valve with her finger, and enjoys pushing it to release some of the milk. Silly girl.

So while it does make a little bit of a mess every now and then, both Mike and I think it is well worth it because it gets her to drink so much more milk than a standard straw or sippy cup, and she has a lot of fun drinking out of it! If we even try to take it away and give her another cup? The little miss gets rather upset.

The Natural Drinking Cup is dishwasher safe and comes with a hygienic snap-on lid, so there is no need to worry about spills while on the go. And it retails for just $6.99 - you can't beat that.
 
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The Natural Drinking Cup and many of Philips AVENT's products for babies, toddlers, and Mommas can be purchased at their online store, on Amazon, or at most local retailers that carry baby and toddler feeding products.

Win
Philips AVENT is generously offering one of my readers a Natural Drinking Cup for their toddler!

How to Enter:
This is a Rafflecopter giveaway. Click "Read More" below and then follow the instructions on the widget. All currents count! Giveaway is open worldwide. Ends at 11:59 PM on Monday, May 7th.

The first entry is mandatory - Visit Philips AVENT and tell me one feature that you like about the Natural Drinking Cup. Once you complete this entry, the widget will give you the option of completing the rest. Complete more steps for more chances to win!

Success with vegetables: Mushroom Gnomes

This post is sponsored by Country Crock. I was selected for this opportunity as a member of Clever Girls Collective, and the content and opinions expressed here are all my own.

We really struggle with getting Carina to eat much of anything at all. Lately, our biggest issue has been vegetables. Despite drenching her broccoli in cheddar cheese or covering her green beans in olive oil, she doesn't really seem to have much interest in eating them. She would rather smear them around her highchair tray or drop them off of it and squeal in delight as they go "splat" on the floor.

I consider myself to always be on the lookout for fun and different ways to serve food, with the hopes that it might actually reach her mouth (and hopefully won't get spit out). I was excited to download and look through the {free} Clare Crespo Digital Cookbook. It contains 25 creative ways to serve veggies for kids. Since Carina has actually taking a tepid liking to mushrooms, I crossed my fingers and decided to try the Mushroom Gnomes recipe.

Mushroom Gnomes - Printable Version!

Ingredients:
12 large white button mushrooms
12 mini red or orange sweet peppers
3 sprigs curly parsley
2 Tbsp. Country Crock® Spread
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 tsp. salt
3 Tbsp. water
A squeeze of lemon juice
12 toothpicks or skewers

Trim stems of mushrooms even with the bottoms of the mushrooms. Trim some of the stem into very tiny pieces for “noses".

Cap-less mushrooms

Trim caps off peppers and scrape out seeds. Save 24 seeds. Cut parsley sprigs into tiny 1/4-inch pieces and bigger 1-inch pieces.

De-capped and de-seeded sweet red peppers

Melt Country Crock® Spread in a large nonstick skillet over medium heat. Add mushrooms, garlic, and 1/8 teaspoon of the salt and sauté until mushrooms are beginning to color, about 5 minutes.

Sizzling mushrooms. I could not believe how amazing this smelled while cooking.

Turn mushrooms stem-side down. Add water; cover and cook over low heat until cooked through, about 10 minutes. Remove mushrooms with tongs and place in a serving dish. Add peppers and remaining 1/8 teaspoon salt to skillet. Cook until crisp-tender, about 5 minutes. Remove from heat.

Place a long toothpick into a pepper and stick on top of mushroom with tip sticking out of the pepper. Arrange larger parsley pieces as “beards” at the base of each mushroom. Stick two pepper seeds on each mushroom as “eyes.” Add tiny parsley “eyebrows.” Stick tiny pieces of mushroom stem on as noses.

The finished product, my gnomes!

These were fantastic, and Carina ate a couple of them...success! M and I ended up soaking up the leftover cooking liquid (laced with garlic and Country Crock® mmmm...) with the mushrooms and peppers and it was delicious. M usually isn't a mushroom fiend like me, but he went to town on these! We plan on making them again in the future, maybe for a party or when we have Carina's cousins visiting in the near future. I think these are definitely a fun and creative way to serve veggies to kids.

Are you looking for quick and simple tips and recipes to make serving veggies more fun? Download the free Clare Crespo Cookbook here for fun and whimsical recipes your family is sure to love!

I want to freaking punch the scale

It's hard not to feel like a failure when your baby doesn't gain a single ounce or grow even a fraction of an inch in more than 7 weeks. Now, had she been experiencing an upward trend and this was just a fluke, I wouldn't be so upset. But, our little babe hasn't even put on 2 pounds since she was about 7 months old. I can't help but feel like I'm a terrible Mom.

About a month ago I wrote about my frustrations in trying to get her to eat and I appreciate all of your advice. I have tried so many different things with her and I really thought we were making progress. She has outgrown some of her clothes in the last couple weeks so I was sure that she had at least put on a little poundage, but no dice.

On average, I would say that I spend at least half of the time she is awake feeding her or trying to get her to eat. It literally consumes our days and has been consuming me. Seeing that number on the scale yesterday - the same number I saw weeks ago - knocked the wind out of me.

So our next steps are blood work to {hopefully} rule out any metabolic issues and a follow up in 6 weeks. I am supposed to continue to feed her high calorie foods as often as possible and hope for the best in the meantime, I guess. I wish she liked chocolate because it's Cadbury Mini Egg season and I know for a fact that they have been to blame for my seasonal freak weight gain in the past...

Are you sure this is my child?

I have had a 28 year love affair with chocolate. I just can't get enough...ever. I may or may not have eaten chocolate cake for breakfast a few days ago. There's a probability possibility that my afternoon snack yesterday was chocolate frosting out of the can.

So when we offered Carina a little bit of chocolate cake for the first time, we expected that she would devour it faster than her beeline for the door when M comes home from work. Yet, she met it with suspicion, and ultimately, apathy.

What is this crumbly brown ugliness you have set before me?

I will try it, despite my better judgment

Hmmm...

I don't think so.

I am not impressed. NEXT!

Who is this child? Surely she can't be mine.

Does your babies enjoy the same things you do? What foods don't they like?

Eat this please, or I'm going to cry again

I took Carina for her 12 month well visit two weeks ago. She is almost 14 months old...oops. In my defense I called our health system right after New Years' but their first available appointment wasn't until mid-February. Lovely. Guess I should have called them the day we moved to town. But that's besides the point.

Carina weighed in at 18 lbs. 4 oz. which is the 3rd percentile for her age. I showed the doctor her previous growth charts and explained that while she was in the 70th percentile for weight from 2-4 months old, her weight plateaued after I went back to work full time and it hasn't rebounded. She is still gaining, but very slowly. M and I were both underweight and at the bottom of the growth charts as kids. So maybe Carina is just going to be small like us?

She really doesn't like to eat. She would much prefer to throw her food around the dining room and/or smush it into her hair. She will eat a few bites of just about anything, but then it turns into playtime. She paints with tomato sauce, fixes her hair with peanut butter, gives herself a yogurt facial, and enjoys dropping pasta on the floor and then pointing at it while exclaiming, "da!".

Do I have something on my face?

Eat it? I thought I was supposed to paint my face with it.

It looks good in my hair, too, doesn't it?

I win. You lose.

I wasn't too worried until the receptionist at the Pediatrician's office called last week. She said that the doctor reviewed Carina's chart and is concerned about her weight. They want to see her again in a month. ::sigh::

Since the high chair has always been a battle, I started putting breakfast, lunch, and snacks on a plate and setting it on the coffee table. She toddles over, eats a bite or two, and then starts playing. So, I bring the plate over to her and offer here more. Over and over again. I feel like I am chasing her around trying to shove food down her throat. I cried a couple days ago when she picked up each and every morsel of food off the plate and and threw it. Clearly, she was as frustrated as I was.

I don't want to feel like I'm spending my whole day trying to get her to eat. She'll eat if she's hungry, right? Like I said before, maybe she is just going to be small? I would so appreciate any advice, tips, and/or words of encouragement. Any parents of tiny kids out there?