Taste

I haven't talked much about what baby food Natalie likes to eat (besides ice cream), maybe because I'm so focused on how she's eating. She likes anything sweet: fruit, sweet potatoes, carrots. She accepts as necessary to eat in order to get the sweets: turkey dinner and chicken dinner. She dislikes and has to have masked with something sweet: green vegetables.

She's been doing well on pureed baby food (stage 2), and we've added baby oatmeal to thicken it, and she does well with that. I've tried smashed avocado twice (very smoothly smashed) and she doesn't like the taste, but we'll keep trying. Same with mashed banana. She seems to finally like yogurt, which is good, so I'm giving her yogurt and baby oatmeal for breakfast. Natalie loves to gnaw on a Zweiback cracker while we're eating, and the therapists put bits of the baby puffs in her cheeks and she handles those well.

We're working on textures now. This week I put some carrots and then macaroni and cheese through the baby mill (which makes the food about the diameter of a pencil lead (the kind used in a mechanical pencil). I added milk to the mac and cheese to thin it a little, but the pieces of food, both mac and carrots, were too much for her to handle. So we have to get her used to it by mixing it with purees first.

We're very encouraged that she's continuing to eat well, even while sick. When she was sick in December, she refused to eat by mouth, but now she's not refusing.