Solids for Ella

Well, my daughter has proven it. Second children are chronically ignored. No wonder as adults they suffer from a constant need for validation and feeling unheard. As a second child, I can attest to that fully. My beautiful baby girl gets so little publicity, it grieves my heart. You'd think I'd do better, knowing what it's like, but it's a fact of life. In the last week she has started solids, is on the tip of crawling, yet I'm only blogging about it right now. I couldn't even document her first taste of sour because I was feeding lunch to both kids at once, and the moment slipped through the only two hands I had. I think with Greyson, I blogged as he ate.

So our baby girl started solids last week. She's tasted baby cereal, avocados, bananas, sweet potatoes and yogurt. She is a tentative but persevering eater. It took her a few days to get the hang of the spoon, and just keeping the food in her mouth, but by the end of the week, she had it down. Now, the moment she sees me start mixing her food up, my usually quiet daughter starts hemming and hawing. This milestone is bittersweet for me. Technically, it is the beginning of weaning, and very soon I'll have to drop my dream feed. A dream feed is the very last feeding of the night. I wake her up just before I go to bed, and she nurses in the living room where we hang out. It's the sweetest feed of the day. Very often, those are the only moments of the day that Roque and I get to spend with her all by herself. As she starts eating more real food, she won't need that feed anymore. And then that's it for my last baby. Once you lose a dream feed, you never get it back again. It is all going by too fast.

Don't let the images fool you, this was actually a crank-ridden event. Greyson was fighting to feed Ella, and for our attention, we were swatting him away and scolding him. I can't even post the video from this actual first time because it isn't presentable to the public for all parties involved. So we shot this video on a much calmer day.