Tooth # 5, food glorious food and the early stages of crawling

Our child seems to be going for some sort of record-breaking performance in the tooth department! Today I spotted tooth # 5! Nope, not “a tooth about to erupt” but a tooth that has already broken through his gums and has already been put to good use on a wide array of teething devices. Surprisingly, this tooth was preceded only by a rare midnight feeding last night and of course copious amounts of drool.

We’ve got Keenan up to 2 solid food meals a day and he’s really enjoying it. I mentioned a while back that I wasn’t sure if his early teeth would indicate an early need for solids. Well I’m pretty sure the two go together in this case. Especially since he’s barely cutting back on his breast-feeding need/interest. We’ve been taking the recommended route of introducing solids one at a time and 4 to 7 days apart to ensure there’s no allergic reaction and so far so good. I’m making all of Keenan’s baby food and freezing it in small batches with great success. So far Keenan loves his veggies more than fruits and his grains include rice, quinoa and oats. He eats quinoa or oats or a mixture of the two which I grind into flour and then cook to make a gruel (yes Tom, the boy loves his gruel as much as you do!) for a mid morning meal. I mix that with one or two fruits such as banana, apple or persimmon. He eats about a half a cup of that followed by a two boobies and then he literally passes out for a few hours. Then in the evening he has rice with one or two veggies like yaki imo (roasted sweet potato), kabocha (Japanese pumpkin) or avocado (I know it’s really a fruit but he doesn’t like it with breakfast!). In between he snacks on rice crackers, which are a blast because they stick to his face and hands when he drools on them! And yesterday I bought spinach and kabocha bite sized biscuits, which he really loves, and are getting him to understand what chewing is all about. Once he hits the 7-month mark we’ll work on expanding his horizons in the food department. We’re holding back on the juice or water except for a very rare treat and even then we dilute the juice with 50% water. The problem is he likes the taste way too much so he’s not happy to only have a wee bit and when we give him more he pukes it up. Here’s something interesting though…if he has a bit of juice with water and then I breast feed him he still pukes but he only pukes up the water and juice not the breast milk. Freaky.

As if getting new teeth and having a good appetite isn’t good enough Mr. Progress is getting better at “pre-crawling” every day. He’s on his hands and knees for longer periods of time now and he really gets into bouncing in that position. When he really gets into it he laughs like crazy and then falls on his face and then laughs some more. So the very near future holds the task of keeping things up high, doing away with cables and a visit to the baby store for all the safety stuff to keep his curious little hands out of cupboards, drawers, heaters and plugs. Oh joy!