Your baby eats WHAT?

No offense to the fine baby food companies (ahem), but baby food is gross. Seriously yucky stuff. So I tried to do solids the "right" way... pureeing my own veggies, shoveling it in her mouth three times a day, trying to distract her enough to open her mouth... but it took WAY too long, was way too messy, and quite frankly, was not a pleasant experience for anyone. Totally frustrating.

Beef stew and blueberries - definately a favorite!

That's when I gave up. I read a book called "Baby Led Weaning" by Gill Rapely. Full disclosure: this not a scientific book. The only scientific study referenced in it was done in the early part of the century. It's full of first-person testimonials, which are interesting but definately not scientific. That being said, I found a lot of logic and rational thought in it. Primarily, do you really think that moms through the ages spent hours pureeing food for their babies? Or wasting so much time trying to spoon-feed little ones who clearly don't desire to be spoon-fed? I doubt it. I don't buy everything in the book, but the basic concept seems sound. So, last week (just in time for Thanksgiving), we switched our approach: Gracie eats what we eat.

Chicken noodle soup

She's actually doing surprisingly well with it. I know she's eating (we cloth diaper... use your imagination), and actually eating a lot more than I thought she would. She's tried pretty much everything I've put in front of her. Sure, it's messy... but you should have seen what we were dealing with when spoon-feeding. Believe it or not, this is cleaner. And she's SOOO happy! We all sit down for our meals together, with Gracie getting a small portion of whatever the meal is. Sometimes I'll cook her something a tiny bit different: last night we had fish but I didn't season her piece, and for lunch today I didn't put sauce on her pasta. But that's minor in the grand scheme of things. We're teaching her not only what food is, but also what family mealtime is. She's a part of our family, and family mealtime is something we very much believe in.

Some kind of sherbert, and yes it's a spoon, but her face is priceless!
This kid makes the best faces.

Has anyone else done this, or something similar? I have a couple friends here that have done solids basically this way. It just seems so natural. Thoughts?

Practically Free Diapering

Have you ever realized at midnight that you forgot to run to the store to buy diapers, or if you cloth diaper, that you forgot to run a load and put your child to bed in the last clean diaper? Or you went out to run errands and miscalculated how many diapers you would need for the day? It's happened. What do you do? Letting Babe sit in yuck is, well, yucky; she can't really go without (ew); buying a package is inconvenient at best, unaffordable at worst... so what do you do?

I actually haven't been in this situation, but a board I'm on is doing a cloth diaper challenge this week specifically for those times when you've got nothing else on hand: The No-Sew T-Shirt Diaper!

That link will take you to a tutorial that shows you how to fold a regular T-shirt into a great cloth diaper. It really does work great -- I've done it a couple times just to see how it worked. I've got a bag of old Ts in my car and another in the basement as part of our emergency kits -- you never know when you'll need them. And if money is an object, but you still need to diaper your little one, you can hit the $5 bag day at your local thrift store and have all the diapers you could need!

Did I mention you can make your child's bum say whatever you want? Oh yes, Gracie loves Jesus... her diaper told me so ;-)

Crash Course in Parenting Philosophy

Gracie's 6 1/2 weeks old! How time flies! Surprisingly, other than loving on my baby, the one thing I've had a ton of time for lately is reading. Grace nurses *a lot* and I'm not a "just sit there" kind of girl. So, as a new mom, what do I read? Every parenting philosophy book I can get my hands on.

Here's a summary of my reading list over the past 6 weeks:

1. Happiest Baby on the Block


2. Secrets of the Baby Whisperer


3. Babywise


4. Dr. Sear's Baby Book


5. What to Expect the First Year


6. Your Baby's First Year, Week by Week


7. Plus a healthy handful of magazines and articles

Information overload much?

I'm a reader. It's who I always have been and probably always will be. I want to know everything I can to make sure I'm doing it "right." The problem with parenting? There is no "right." Oh boy, am I struggling with this.

We started out doing pretty straight-forward Attachment Parenting, as endorsed by Sears et. al. Wear your baby, feed on demand, shared sleeping, etc. I love the idea -- who doesn't love cuddling a bundle of joy 24hrs a day? But in practice? I don't know about your household, but some parts of this just don't fly here. I like my pillows and blankets way too much to safely share sleeping arangements with Grace. And, since I'm a first time mommy with very little baby experience, I'm really struggling with her cues: to me, everything sounds like "hungry." The poor girl spent the whole weekend crying while nursing. Turns out she was completely exhausted and I kept trying to keep her awake to feed. I was exhausted, too -- she was eating every 45min to hour. Sigh. Live and learn.

So while my poor sweetheart cried the weekend away, Stressed-Out-Mommy spent nursing time reading Baby Whisperer and Babywise, trying to find "a better way." Both those philosophies recommend a Flexible Routine concept. Baby wakes up, baby eats, baby plays, baby sleeps. This is in contrast to the AP idea of nursing Baby to sleep. They also recommend putting Baby down awake and using Cry it Out. I love the idea of getting Grace less dependant on me to fall asleep, but honestly? I think it might kill me to let her cry at this point.

So here I am, knowing too much information and struggling to successfully apply any of it. We're doing the eat/play/sleep routine from Babywise... wearing Gracie in our Moby wrap a la Attachment Parenting... putting her down awake according to Baby Whisperer... and to confuse everything, using a pacifier...

And of course, praying all along that hopefully someday she'll turn out all right.

What do you do? Do you follow a philosophy? Or do you fling it all together in a happy hodge-podge of ideas? And most importantly, does it SOMEDAY start to make sense?!?!