7 months, day 9 - Chewing, crawling, Södering

We're taking a new approach to eating. I did some reading about baby-led weaning (I perused Baby Led Weaning, this pamphlet, and some other websites) and realized that this philosophy is very much in line with how I/we want to be feeding our little sproglet. The basic idea is that you don't bother with purees or with "baby food": you give your baby real, solid food from about six months and let them handle it and feed themselves. We've already been going with the whole idea of Augie-eats-what-we-eat, but we've been pureeing his part of the meal. After today's reading, we're giving him spears or nobs of soft foods and letting him feed himself. Today he ate banana, feta from our lunch salad, and roasted carrots and sweet potatoes - all by picking up his own food and putting it in his mouth.

The idea is that this way, baby learns to chew and then swallow or spit it out if necessary (rather than just to swallow, as with purees), and he also engages with his food more - he feels it, smells it, and tastes it. (In truth, he was sort of doing all of these things before when he'd get his hands on the spoon and smear puree all over EVERYTHING within a two foot radius). And importantly, he decides exactly how much he's going to eat.

He's a bit clumsy with the food so far, but from what I read, after even just a couple days baby's pincer grasp and hand-eye coordination will develop and more and more food will be getting into his mouth. Tonight I was impressed by how little food, comparatively, was splattered on the kitchen floor, walls, dining table, high chair tray, back of the high chair, seat of the high chair, and me, than on a usual pureed-food night.

Enough about food.

Today we went on another urban adventure. We took the blue bus to Södermalm, a super-hip part of the city, and walked around. We intended to do a bit of shopping, but then we got to the shopping street and I went into a shopping store and freaked out, as I usually do when I go into stores, and we turned off the street and left retail dys-therapy behind.

We found a gorgeous churchyard with open green space and a cemetery, and plunked down to let Augie roll around in the grass for a bit. We had a fantastic time, all rolling around together, tickling and biting each other - and Augie crawled the big-boy crawl! As in real, actual, hands-and-knees crawling! It wasn't pretty, but he went 10-15 feet.

The rest of the day was mostly walking and wandering.

Mr. Coolio on the bus:

Action shot of the crawling:

Pausing for a little nibble:

Sky baby:

Giving Baba the smackdown:

Cheeky little fella:

We had lunch at a cafe with this view:

Still cheeky hours later after wearing out Baba: