Posts Tagged "decisions"
Gagging Not Choking
I survey the carnage.
I have been cooking. With three cupboards, an oven that doesn’t work properly and one work surface measuring less than half a metre wide, preparing food becomes a complicated dance of pirouetting, rearranging and balancing, with a few swear words thrown in for good measure, and giving everything at least 10 minutes longer to cook than it should.
The dishes are piled high in the sink, with me somehow managing to use every utensil I own just to cook chicken and rice. I have spilled sauce on the hob and on me and may have inadvertently ‘lost’ some onion down the side of the cooker. You know nothing ok? We’ll just pretend that didn’t happen (or that I dropped some pasta down there yesterday).
But, I’m done. And nothing is burnt. Bonus.
I stick my head round the door of the front room where Kai and his dad are zoned out in front of Gigglebiz – ‘Little Britain for toddlers’ my hubby has described it as. Spot on. “Kai, do you want some food?” I ask while doing our ‘food’ sign that Kai’s just beginning to start to copy “It’s time for tea!”. “Yeah Yeah!” shouts Kai jumping up.
Wrestled into his highchair Kai is soon tucking in with gusto to his rice and chicken. He grabs his fork for good measure and gives a few half-hearted stabs but it is soon forgotten in favour for great big fist-fulls alternated with delicate pincer-grip motions, picking up tiny grains one by one and examining them before down they go with a enthusiastic lip smack. Big bits of chicken are chewed and quickly devoured. Water is quaffed and waved about and dripped onto the high chair tray to make patterns with. When interest starts to wane, daddy steps in with the forgotten fork and I watch as they share their special mealtime game of ‘one for me one for you’, amazed that Kai is finally letting us near him with utensils after months of refusing to eat anything off a fork or spoon except Kai ambrosia (yoghurt) and that only because hands just don’t get enough in quick enough.
I love mealtimes.
They are my favourite part of the day. Ant is home from work, bedtime is fast approaching and ensconced in his highchair with a big plate of food before him Kai is (usually!) at his most charming and entertaining. Mouthfuls for him are usually alternated with tidbits offered to daddy and me, and sometimes the cat for good measure. He sings, he chews his way through enough food to feed a small army, he pulls glorious and comical faces as he tries and assesses new tastes and at least half the offered food ends up on his lap, in his hair or on the floor.
It is glorious.
At not-quite fifteen months old I have to say that I think eating is one of Kai’s party pieces. The way he gets through a meal is usually enough to stop most people in their tracks, and make them smile and comment especially when they realise how old he is – an age when a lot of his peers are still only just being weaned of mush and onto ‘grown-up’ food.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am far from proud or sure of many things I have done as a mother. But Kai’s weaning is one thing I think I’ve done rather well. In fact, both Ant and I are in complete agreement – weaning Kai the way we did was one of the best decisions we’ve ever made as parents. I talked a little about it previously, but the long and short of it is this:
We held off weaning until Kai turned six months old, despite everyone’s abject horror and insistence that we were starving the poor child. And then we did something that everyone thought was completely mad (and by everyone I mean my mother – come on mum I know you’ll admit it). We didn’t give him pureed baby food, we just gave him big chunks of proper food to pick up and gnaw on himself. He could choose what to eat or not to eat and how much. And if he didn’t want anything at all that was fine too. It’s known as ‘Baby-Led Weaning’ but personally I think it should just be called ‘common sense weaning’.
“But he’ll choke!!” was the first objection. Well actually, no. He didn’t choke. He did gag a lot to start with which everyone PRESUMED was choking, but look – he’s just coughing and learning to move food around in his mouth and not bite off quite such a big bit next time. And he’s already tucking into the next piece. It upset everyone else far more than it upset Kai… Gagging is a natural and pretty essential reflex if you’re going to learn how to eat safely.
“But he’s not really eating anything!!” was the next concern. OK – granted, not an awful lot got ‘consumed’ as it were in the first few weeks of weaning (although the first time it did the resulting nappy was a shocker I can tell you!) In fact, not really till Kai hit about 10 months old did he start eating consistently. But look again. This boy is hovering above the 75% percentile on his growth charts and I’d done my research – milk, breast milk especially will meet up to something stupid like 98% of his nutritional needs for the first year, and still provide the vast majority well into his second year. So there was no rush. Exploring tastes and textures were always the priority to start with – if in doubt I just kept repeating the mantra “Food under 1 is just for fun”. It worked – just look at him now.
“But he’ll be a picky eater if you let him choose what to eat – he won’t eat the right things!!” I never really got this argument. He has tastes, of course he does, and preferences same as anyone else. He still thinks broccoli is the devil’s fare no matter how many times I offer it him. He loves sweet things, but will choose fruit over a biscuit any day. Strawberries don’t even touch the sides. Some things (like potato) he took a long time to warm too but now are his favourites. Other things, like carrot, he seems to go through phases of liking. One thing I have noticed that if offered a good variety of foods, over the course of a week Kai will usually eat a good balance of protein, carbs, diary and fruit and veg. 
But not all in one meal – sometimes all he’ll want to eat is pasta, or cucumber. But the next day you can guarantee will be a ‘chicken day’. I’m working on the assumption that somehow, intrinsically, he knows what he’s doing.
“But you’re encouraging him to play with his food – what about table manners?!”. That’s for next year. At the moment we’re all about the fun. Babies wash. Floors wash. We wash. It’s not a big deal. Flinging didn’t last long and once Kai learnt what ‘no’ meant it got short shrift from us. But if you want to draw patterns in your spaghetti and smear Shepherd’s Pie in your hair? We’re ok with that.
Now, 8 months after starting on our weaning adventures, not one person questions our decision. The results speak for themselves. My dad is evangelising baby-led weaning to the girls in his office, my mum is humbly proclaiming that she has ‘learnt a lot’, and the mother-in-law is glowing with pride.
So there we go. One big success story. Nice to share one of them for a change!
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This post was written for the Carnival of Eating over at Tired Mummy’s Blog – please pop over and lend it your support.
And If you want to learn more about Baby-Led Weaning as an option when weaning your babies I would really recommend this blog and forum for tips, recipes, and much needed reassurance when you’re getting started. Or talk to me!
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Read MoreA Leap in the Dark
(If you don’t like long stories – skip to the bottom. I won’t mind)
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Once upon a time there was a little girl. She liked to dream and imagine things and read hundreds and hundreds of books and ask pretentious questions and be in charge. She loved to write stories and imagine adventures in her head and generally preferred being in her thinking place than outside, where things tended to get a bit scary and insist on changing all the time, usually just as she thought she’d got the hang of this being alive business.
And then one day, out of no-where, and even though she REALLY didn’t want to, she Grew Up.
She still dreamed and still imagined and asked even more pretentious questions but as a Grown-Up was told she needed to be ‘responsible’ and ‘realistic’ and ‘practical’ and all of a sudden all her dreams and imaginings seemed very small and insignificant and worthless and certainly not the kind of thing that had any value in the Real World. Instead of having adventures in her head she was told she needed to do things like go to work and make enough money to keep her and the very Handsome Prince she had met in crisps and ice-cream and chocolate digestives.
She was confused. Everyone kept asking her what she was going to do with her life but she didn’t know. All the other Grown-Ups seemed to have decided and were busy getting on with life and having Real Careers and being everything confident, secure, competent Grown-Ups should be. And since their Real Careers seemed to mean they got to do fun stuff like buying houses and cars and going on holiday, and since she also wanted to feel confident and secure and competent she decided she’d give this being a Grown-Up business a go. Even though she didn’t feel the slighest bit confident, she hoped if she ran fast enough in the right direction then eventually she’d end up where everyone else was.
But try as she might things kept getting in the way. First she got ill, which was a real pain in the ass, and although it meant she could sit around in PJ’s all day which had always been in her top 5 requirements for her dream job, it wasn’t quite what she had in mind given that it was accompanied by generally feeling like crap. So getting better became top of her priority list, along with filling her long days with learning about all kind of random stuff to pass the time and distract her from the disgruntled beavers nibbling at her joints.
But she still hadn’t decided. You know, on the ‘Real Career’.
One day she got better (eventually – man alive that took a long time. Cities rose and fell in the time it took her to teach her feet to work one in front of the other. Physiotherapy definitely not for her if she couldn’t even get her own body to work properly – at least that’s one to strike off the list). Well, better enough. She managed to get a job that just happened to involve reading stories all day and teaching other children how to dream and imagine stuff all for themselves. And it was pretty cool. For a while. Not quite a Real Career (given the lack of future prospects and, well, decent pay), but it made do while the girl continued to try and figure it all out.
Then something magical happened. Her and the Handsome Prince got married and grew a whole new person. A tiny, needy, beautiful little person. And just like that things got Very Real Indeed. All of a sudden the girl found herself doing probably the most Grown-Up job you can do that, despite all pre-conceptions, just left her feeling even less confident and secure and competent than she had before. And though she loved this little person more than she ever knew it was possible to love something and not have your heart pop out of your chest and make a big mess on the floor, she also found it very, very hard and scary and found she wanted to go back to that thinking place in her head and do some imagining to recover.
So she started a blog. And wrote, and thought, and dreamt, and told jokes which made her feel better. A LOT better. And what made her feel even better still was that the people that read her random ramblings seemed to quite enjoy them, and wanted her to write more. She got the opportunity to write for a brand new Toy Review Site, and then to help out as Deputy Editor, which she kind of loved, and made lots of lovely new friends.
And sneakily, without her even realising it, the old dreams and yearnings to write came creeping back. She was that little girl again, sat surrounded by books thinking that words and pictures in your head were just about the best thing about being alive (although, she now also thought that tiny people covered in porridge and giving her big kisses were equally brilliant which shows that change is sometimes a good thing).
Oh but wait! I missed a bit out! (which coincidently is JUST the kind of thing the girl would do, given her inability to do anything in a straight line, especially walking).
Amidst her year of changing nappies, and being puked on, and getting her boobs out and traipsing up and down the stairs ten zillion times every evening, the age-old question has reared it’s ugly head. All her fellow mummy friends had gone back to work and here it was haunting her once again. What on earth was she was going to do with her life? (apart from pop out babies, which apart from the poo and the no-sleep thing was kinda fun). In an effort to make a decision once and for all, and make some money and FINALLY get herself that Real Career and the house and the car and all the rest, she signed up to do a degree in Earth Sciences. She wasn’t really sure why. She liked nature and stuff and thought, although it would be hard, would also be nice and safe. She’d probably get her essays back with big gratifying red ticks. And eventually a nice, safe job that would pay reasonably well and make her feel like a Proper Grown-Up at last.
But.
It wasn’t writing. And writing was pretty much all she wanted to do these days. The more and more she thought about it, the less sure she felt about the whole caboodle and the day all her study materials arrived she cried.
So here she was. Two paths laid out before her. On one side was a lovely safe path, with interesting things to study and A+s within her grasp, and a nice job at the end of it all.
It looked kind of dull.
On the other side was a big yawning cliff. It was a very long way down and held lots of opportunities for failure and disappointment and generally making a fool of herself. But it made her heart do a little skip with excitement when she thought about. And somewhere in the distance, there was a beautiful, alluring, dream-fullfilling place with Writer written in big letters on the sign over the entrance, and people sitting around in the PJs making up stuff and being interesting and arty and neglecting their housework. They didn’t seem to have much money, but damn, were they having fun.
So guess what she did.
She jumped.
She cancelled her place on the Earth Science degree and signed up for this course, which starts in a month and, coupled with some other equally fun writing courses over the next few years, would give her both an Open BA (Hons) Degree AND a Diploma in Literature and Creative Writing . To learn about writing and give her an excuse to write all day under the guise of being a student, and generally give her the opportunity to see if she could make this writing thing stick.
She re-designed her blog as a way of increasing her audience and give her a place to showcase her writing efforts. And for the first time in a VERY long time, she felt truly happy and content. Yes she was scared. Very, very scared. Of failing, of everyone not taking her seriously, of rejection. But it was a good kind of scared. The kind of scared that might come before something really wonderful.
And in celebration of all of this she wrote a very long, convoluted story to tell you all about it.
THE END
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P.S. You got that the girl is me right? And that I’ve jacked in my Science Degree to follow my dreams of becoming a real life writer? Yes? Good, good. Just checking…
