1.

Ingrid has been practising holding a spoon for a while now. In fact she’s been doing that since before she was eating solids. She wanted to sit with us at the table, so in order to keep her occupied I used to give her a spoon to play with. So she can hold a spoon, and she knows that the spoon occasionally holds food. She knows which end of the spoon is the business end. In the last few days she has even learned to take hold of the spoon when I offer it to her, and put it in her mouth.

But she hasn’t understood that the spoon gets its goodness from the bowl, even though she sees me put the spoon in the bowl again and again. Every time she takes the spoon out of her mouth, she puts it down on the table, without even trying to point it towards the bowl. I have to refill the spoon and give it back to her. Today I started leaving the filled spoon in the bowl for her to grab – maybe that will bring the point across.

I’d demonstrate it for her with a piece of food (take spoon, put food on spoon, give spoon to her) if it wasn’t for her habit to turn the spoon upside down before putting it in her mouth. Instead of taking the food off the spoon with her lips (which is what we do) she licks it off with her tongue, and that of course is much easier if the spoon is upside down.

2.

Whenever we go grocery shopping, I give her something to hold and play with, so she doesn’t get bored. She does get bored rather quickly otherwise. A packet of cheese works well, or a bag of carrots, or other not-too-big unbreakable items with interesting shapes. She turns them around in her hands, tries with her mouth, occasionally throws them on the floor. Bags are especially good because I can put the bag in the trolley and “accidentally” leave it within her reach, so she can pick them up herself. She likes that.

Except that today I discovered that a bag of carrots will, in fact, not work so well any more. When I took the bag from her to put it on the checkout conveyor, I noticed it was rather stickier than usual. They’re almost always a bit wet from the chewing, but this time I discovered small carrot flakes on the outside of the bag… and lots of little indentations in the carrots. Oops… forgot about the teeth! I guess she knows how to use them.

3.

Plums are in season, so I’ve been giving her some almost every day, and she likes them. They’re slippery, so I give the pieces to her from my hand rather than putting them on the table. She’s quite good at getting them to her mouth and rarely drops them. I cut the plums into segments so the pieces are long and narrow and easy to grip. (I also peel the pieces for her, because she cannot really chew fruit skins yet, and they tend to get stuck at the back of her mouth and make her gag. So I’ve been eating lots of plum skins recently.) The plum strips are quite big for her, bigger than one of her fingers, but she rarely bites off a piece – no, it all has to go in her mouth in one piece. Which means that she gets one end in and then sucks the rest in with a wet slurping sound.

4.

Sometimes she shows no interest in the food on the spoon, because she doesn’t know what I’m offering her – for example when I switch from veggies to yogurt. But when I touch her lips with the food she realises that it’s good stuff and does her little bird impersonation.

On the other hand, she always knows when she’s really had enough, and shows it clearly by turning her head away. I wonder if the head-shaking for “no” originates in babies shaking their head to avoid a spoonful of unwanted food?