Our Second Foray into Baby-Led Weaning

The kids have identical booster seats and when they sat side-by-side in their seats at the dinner table, Soren looked so tiny in his compared with his big brother.  But he looked so pleased to be sitting there on his own and among his family.  Soren was ready to start solids and with that, ready to start another milestone.

Being that we're a lot more relaxed as second-time parents, we've approached the solid food stage with much fewer expectations than we had with Oliver.  And we're so much busier and distracted now that Soren's first introductions to solids were mere afterthoughts as I looked at my dinner plate for something suitable to offer him.  And when he wasn't interested in nibbling from my plate, I wasn't let down, because clearly I had not gone to any extra effort to prepare him anything.   Eventually I did prepare something for him, a banana, but he just stared at for awhile.  And this is from a kid who tries to put everything in his mouth, even my head, when he grasps clumps of my hair with his fists and tries to suck on my forehead.  Five minutes later he got bored of looking at the banana and cried to get out.

The past couple of nights Soren finally began to show interest in food.  I gave him some steamed broccoli and while he just stared at it at first and looked on the verge of tears, we ignored him and continued eating our dinner and a minute later I glanced over and he was trying to shove a broccoli floret, stem first, into his mouth with both fists.  He spent the rest of dinner happily gnawing on his vegetables.  Among the other traditional and not-so-traditional first foods Soren has experienced have been steamed green beans, pears and quinoa veggie burgers.