lately: ice cream

so it's summertime and cole is teething - hello ice cream! it might not look like he's really enjoying it, but try taking it away...

on and off, we've been having a less-than-ideal time with food lately. i don't know if it's just the teething or maybe a stage he's going through, but it's been a hard slog getting much into him... he is crazy for crackers and i have to laugh because every time we sit down to eat he hopefully asks "cack-or?". i'm trying very hard to make crackers a snack-time food only and not a replacement for actual food... we can't even eat salad with croutons in front of him because he will ignore everything on his plate and try to mooch our "cack-ors" with much pointing, groaning and melodrama. always with the crackers...

give the kid anything bready - toast, pancakes, cereal or porridge, rice cakes - and he'll go to town. sometimes homemade mac & cheese too, but it's confounding - one day he'll eat as much as you can give him, the next he just chucks it all... the other day when he was walking down the aisle in the grocery store he accosted a display of kraft dinner with excited exclamations of "noo noo". i guess he recognized the picture - or perhaps an ingrained canadian love of kd?

he loves fruit, which i'm thankful for, and he would gladly eat it until it gave him problems... blueberries and strawberries are favourites right now... watermelon, grapes and apricots too. at least he won't have scurvy! vegetables, not so much. oven-baked yam fries are usually a hit, and he'll sometimes put cucumbers into his mouth. he'll eat corncobs and many things will sometimes get a second glance or even a touch on the lips, but rarely get inside... i had better luck with things like squash before and may have to drum up some non-seasonal ones... he hasn't touched peas since we got back from the uk.

he will eat some meat, but he's very particular. he seems fond of meatloaf and bits of burger, loves salmon and will eat chicken occasionally if it's particularly spicy or curried. he's cool with eggs and i think he would eat more fish if i cooked more fish... he loves cheese and yogurt and milk too. and peanut butter - i got over my media-manufactured nerves about peanut butter a few weeks ago and all is well on that score. if i can get him to consistenly eat the mac & cheese and pb&j i should be set. ;-)

we're down to one, maybe two nursing sessions a day generally, except this last couple of weeks he's constantly been at it, always "mi-mi" and stretching the collars on my shirts... i'm glad that we can fill any gaps in his nutition with breast milk, but looking back over this rambling post about food i'm realizing that he eats quite a lot of stuff... i guess it doesn't feel like it some days when it's all about crackers and all the other food seems to end up on the floor, but overall it's pretty good...

we have a british baby-feeding book that has been a great reference - very factual and down-to-earth. it's funny because it's always making references to the 'tea time meal' and what kinds of puddings are healthy (apparently anything with flour, eggs, cocoa or fruit). it features such common-sense advice as "if he does not eat milk for one day his bones will not crack up". and from early days cole has loved the kid on the front of the book. we call him "messy baby" and chase cole around with the book while he laughs hysterically. as you can see, it might have been considered a source of food at one point: