Combination lunch

We're at the stage where we are combining feeding and entertainment. Read: he wants to self-feed a.k.a. play with his food before putting it in his mouth.

On today's menu: slow-poached organic chicken, carrots, peas, with toasted wholewheat bread followed by rice cereal, applesauce and baby num-nums for dessert. I'm not sure how much of the food actually made it to his belly but after about an hour in the high chair he seemed sated. I was a little skeptical that he actually ingested anything because I fished out lots of carrots, chicken, and bread from every nook and cranny of his high chair and his clothes, plus Hoovered the equivalent of another quarter of the bread from the floor.

His belly seemed full, so I was not too worried. I managed to coax him into taking spoonfuls of vegetables and chicken in between so I guess he might have eaten enough.

Besides, he combined the feeding and playing with another natural activity after a meal -- you know, the kind that nicely fills the diaper and puts a proud smile on his face -- so I suspected there was enough incoming that forced that out of his system.

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Another thing today: he oscillated between being a toddler and a baby. One minute he is pushing my hand away because he wants to do it himself, then one minute I will offer him a spoonful of food and he would open his mouth without reaching for the spoon. This is the baby who has been using a spoon since he was six months old! I heard that this might happen. You can almost see the internal struggle between "see what I can do" (independence) and "please, baby me, mommy" (dependence). Aaah, my cute little boy.