first foods: a game of trial and error

i don't know about you but when i imagined baby girl eating solids for the first time, i pictured myself in the kitchen whipping up tasty blends on the baby food processor -- i may or may not have been wearing a fancy apron and dancing barefoot in the kitchen -- with the kitchen window open and birds chirping off in the distance.

beyond the cliche picture i just painted, the goal was to make all of her food so she doesn't have to digest anything processed. we sort of already failed at that when we introduced her to rice cereal as her first food. we went with rice cereal because we thought it would be the easiest transition from breast milk. we mixed it with my breast milk (i may have added too much milk because the final result was a soupy milk consistency with the tiniest bit of rice cereal mixed in) then we spoon fed it to her but we might as well just put it in a bottle since it was pretty much just breastmilk.

give me a break, i'm new at this and i didn't want to risk her rejecting it. 

after about a week of rice cereal we moved on to the highly nutritious egg yolk. so we boiled some eggs, scooped out the yolk, mixed it with breastmilk and voila! egg milk puree! 

she hated it.

we've now moved on to sweet potatoes. so as i mentioned before, i took to the kitchen to whip up the best darn sweet potato puree in the history of home cooked baby meals. i used the recipe from sage spoonfuls, which was basically just steam chunks of sweet potato, mash it up with a fork, add breastmilk to help with consistency and add a dash of cinnamon for taste. well, she was yet again unimpressed. after a couple failed attempts to get her to swallow some small spoonfuls, we ended up placing the rest of it in her kidsme food feeder where she seemed to enjoy it enough to finish it. 

you know that feeling when you make yourself a hot cup of tea that sounds delicious and exotic, you smell it and set yourself up somewhere cozy, smile as it goes in and then all your hopes and dreams are crushed in one tiny sip as you quickly realize that tea isn't all it's cracked up to be. pretty sure this is how she feels about her much anticipated introduction to solids.

in all honesty, this stage is just to get her familiar with the process of swallowing and to introduce her to different tastes but if i'm going to give her the tiniest bit of anything besides my super nutritious breastmilk, i want it to be organic, fresh and delicious. she has an entire life filled with a world of processed foods, might as well at least try to get her on the right track before the evil advertisements suck her in.