Rice Cereal

Now that Clara is 6 1/2 months old, I decided I could feed her rice cereal. There were a few reasons I was putting it off: she gets all the nutrients she needs from me, solids are inconvenient, I didn't want to do it too soon and make her tummy hurt and I didn't want to feel like my baby is old. But, yesterday I decided I couldn't put it off longer and I wanted to go back to feeding her five times a day (I went from five back to six when the Dr. showed concern for how little weight she was gaining). Clara puts pretty much anything she can get her hands on into her mouth and if there is nothing in her hands, she settles FOR her hands. This said, I thought, she is going to LOVE eating rice cereal. HA! The first time, I kind of scraped the spoon on the top of her mouth and she could not figure out what was going on. There was something on the roof of her mouth and she couldn't get it off. So I added a smidgen of water and warmed it up and that didn't help. She would take it, stare at us and then spit it back out with her tongue. Then, nearly every time I went towards her mouth with the spoon, she would grab at it. Eventually, once the rice cereal was somewhere on her face or in her neck fat, I gave her the spoon and she LOVED chewing on it. Hmmm... we'll see how long this will take her to figure out. Here is a before, two durings and an after.