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Monday, November 12, 2007

Illa huius pabli

My little girl's all grown up and eating solid-(ish) foods. I am rather sad about this, but it was the inevitable, I suppose. She's been watching us carefully at dinnertime, popping her mouth open in sync with each spoonful we give ourselves, and calling for our attention. And although I do have plenty of milk, Rachel seems to go through it like water! She just wants to eat and eat and eat, so my mom suggested that we give her some pablum.

I'm not sure that I was entirely ready for it. Here are some of my reservations: I was hoping to have her be mainly breastfed until she was 6 months old. I feel like we've just barely gotten the hang of breastfeeding and she is already wanting to branch out. Eating solid foods means that she doesn't need me as much. Breastfeeding is cheaper than baby cereal.

But I guess I'll just have to get over those reservations because she loved it!

I suppose she'll still be mostly breastfed because she'll still want to drink milk more than eat cereal (hopefully). We've technically been breastfeeding for about 4 months, even though it's only been about a three weeks without the shield. She still needs me, which in turn means that she still loves me. And really, I eat enough to feed like 5 people when I'm lactating, so perhaps baby cereal is a little cheaper than having me be a milk factory.

It will make it easier to leave her with a sitter and she won't want to eat quite as often and will hopefully sleep better.

There are a lot of benefits, but still, I don't like to see my baby girl growing up.

Andrew was super excited for Rachel to start on solids. He wanted to try her pablum but I was going to mix some milk in with it so, as a special request, I stirred some up with some water for him to try before I added the milk. Having passed his taste test, we were ready to feed Rachel. We got her all seated and bibbed and then I showed Andrew how to do it. They were having a great time together, playing airplane, spilling food all over, and over all just having a great time.

7 comments:

  1. Yay! Rachel is eating solid foods! It is really so fun to have them eat solids. And she will of course need you, though it may be for different things throughout her life.

    Oh, make sure when she is ready to try different vegetables and fruits and stuff, to let her try everything. You really can get them used to eating different foods at a young age. Another thing you can do instead of always just feeding her rice cereal (which is great because it is fortified) is whenever you make rice for yourselves--like brown rice, black rice, or whatever, you can make it for Rachel too by boiling the already made rice with more water...it makes it really soft and mushy like..then you can add small amounts of meat or egg or veggies...of course that will be later on..

    How fun!

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  2. that's what my mom used to do for me...boil the rice a while so that it gets mushy and then put different korean foods in it. Back in the day when there wasn't fortified cereals and stuff.

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  3. She of this... what? Can't find Pablis in my Latin dictionary. LOL. Illa I've got... singular nominative feminine pronoun... huius I've got... genetive singular... Pablis I can't find. Help!

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  4. Ooooooooooooh. I see what you've done. :-D Pabulum is a 2nd declension neuter noun, so the genetive is i, not is. Gotcha.

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  5. Oh...I'll change that. We don't really know Latin at all. We were using our Italian knowledge and then trying to look things up on online dictionaries--none of which were very helpful. So instead we tried different things and then google searched them to see if they turned up.

    Illa huius did. Pablis didn't. We didn't try pabli because we simply didn't know if you could borrow words backwards into Latin. Pablum is Italian-esque though. We tried huius panis though, and that showed up a few places so that's how we declined pablum.

    You're much better at Latin than we are--you even have a dictionary. :)

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  6. With Karen I had tons of milk but she wanted the cereal too...So I would pump at the time that she had been nursing but was now eating regular food and used that for her cereal for almost 6 months (she started cereal at 3 1/2 months). That way I got some relief and she got what she wanted for dinner! And it really does help them sleep through the night!!!

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  7. I'm just a total nerd! I think the pablum word that we've been using all our lives comes from the Latin "pabulum." Which may be why you couldn't find it, cause you need that extra u in there to get it to work in Latin dictionaries. This is when having paper dictionaries works better than online ones... :-D Seriously, though, can you believe I'm such a geek that I actually went looking things up to see what it meant and which declensions were the right ones... I'm hopeless! LOL. yes, I do have one or two dictionaries of dead languages lying around...

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