The top two incisors have arrived, and the time of purées is nearing its end, to be replaced by the time of messes.

A month ago Ingrid was still mostly eating mashed and puréed veggies and pulses, plus porridge. (And milk, of course.) For a long while she wasn’t particularly interested in feeding herself – she wasn’t trying to grab my food and put it in her mouth, as I hear other babies do. No, if she got hold of food, she would play with it. She particularly liked hitting any spilled food on the table with the flat of her palm (SPLAT!) and sending food flying everywhere – or smearing it around with big arm movements. Another favourite was taking a piece of food in her hand and then squeezing it hard, until it all oozed out between her fingers. Despite her habit of putting all her toys in the mouth, and despite her skill at picking up and correctly using the sippy cup, the idea of using hands to actually feed herself just didn’t seem to click.

So some time after she got her first teeth, I started feeding her small pieces of soft-boiled vegetables. I had to pop them in her mouth myself – she would open her mouth wide like a little bird, but not pick up the food herself. But after a while she got the point, and started trying for herself. Her little chubby fingers weren’t exactly adept at picking up slippery lumps of veggies, but she persisted, and developed a rather messy, but quite effective eating technique – the Full Hand Mash. Pick up the piece of food with her thumb and first two fingers. On the way to the mouth, the food will slip into her hand, and the more she tries, the more the food slips, until it ends up in her palm. She chases it with her mouth, until the hand is open and the food cannot flee any further, and is caught by the mouth. At this point the hand covers half her face, and food is everywhere. Here’s what it can look like. (An optional follow-on is to then scratch her ear with the same hand, to make sure that all her face is evenly covered with food.)

Since those early efforts (just a few weeks ago), Ingrid has practiced a lot and improved her eating technique a lot. She can now eat even such slippery things as banana and juicy plums and nectarines. And she is now much less likely to hoard and later spit out any lumps in her food, although some pieces go back and forth between her hands and mouth a few times before she actually swallows them.

In fact her taste is becoming quite mature. She prefers complex flavours to bland purées: any quick meal that I make from our frozen mashed veggies is generally rejected unless I add a bit of spices or tomato sauce or creme fraiche etc. Her favourite is, of course, whatever we eat: even things that I had thought would be too strong for her (such as a moroccan tahine roast) have gone down well (but she was really thirsty afterwards!). But she will also happily eat the basic good stuff: fruit, bread, yogurt (I buy Little Rachel’s organic yogurts because they have no added sugar), cheese, porridge.

And just like us, she likes variety. If I offer her only one thing for lunch – a veggie mix, for example – she will get tired and start shaking her head at the spoon after a while. But if she then gets some bread, and maybe a bit of fruit, she gets her appetite back, and we can go back to the veggies again, and then go another round.

Unlike us, though, she is not vegetarian. She gets chicken and fish at the nursery, and whenever we feed her jar food (which is only when we’re travelling) we make sure to choose the meatiest ones. And unlike us, she doesn’t get any of the sugary stuff. Luckily for us she doesn’t yet know what she is missing.

I’ve only noticed one thing that she doesn’t like, and that’s peas. Although I’ve only tried puréed peas (not yucky boiled mashed ones, but a coarse purée of fresh green peas) – maybe she’ll like whole peas better.