The most exciting thing about this week was all the food that Ruben’s been eating. We had planned to follow Annabel Karmel’s very helpful meal planner, in which she suggests that for the first week we just do a little lunch and gradually build up to 3 meals a day. Ruben, however, had a different idea, and we’re pretty much doing 3 meals a day already – just one week after he tried his very first taste of baby rice.
Very impressive.
In addition to baby rice, Ruben has added a range of foods to his repertoire including: apple, pear, banana (he likes to chew on it whole, doesn’t like it mashed), honeydew melon (sharing some breakfast with mum before going to see the summer exhibition at the Royal Academy with his buddies Theo and Issac), butternut pumpkin, sweet potato, potato and carrots, potato and pumpkin, straight carrot, and a mix of roast vegetables from our baked dinner the other day (carrots, parsnip and sweet potato). His least favourite is mashed banana and, I think… most favourite was pear with some baby rice for breakfast. It’s hard to tell which is the favourite though because he really does love his food. Clever boy.
Without going into too much detail – nappy changing has become a whole different and sometimes surprising experience for us now. Wow.
As you can see, Ruben is getting really good at sitting up these days. With a bit of concentration, he can sit for as long as he wants to (usually until he gets bored of it or distracted by something more exciting). His two bottom teeth are growing bigger and sharper by the day, and his talking is getting better and better.
We regularly hear things that sound very much like ‘hello’, ‘mamma’ and ‘dad dad dad’ and even one ‘hola’, but it’s not entirely clear that he has a clue what he’s talking about, so we’re not really counting them as ‘first words’ yet… this whole ‘first word’ thing is a lot more complicated than you’d imagine. Perhaps we’ll just make up something funny and tell him later it was his first word. Suggestions?
As mentioned before, this week’s outings included a Friday trip to the Royal Academy to see the Summer Exhibition which was a lovely day out. On Thursday we caught up with most of the NCT crew at Ros’s place for lunch (see video above) which was lots of fun. We brought mini strawberry pavlovas for everyone – we’ve been quite addicted to over the past week or so. Well, not Ruben, because he’s not allowed to eat strawberries yet…
On Saturday the boys spent the day hanging out together while mum headed into town to a conference where she was speaking – for a bit of change, she was talking not about work stuff, but about Ruben! (Well, mostly about how baby’s brains develop after they’re born and how clever that is, using Ruben as a particularly cute and interesting example).
We also got a new toy – a tiny little video camera that fits perfectly into mum’s handbag so expect more like these in the coming weeks!
As a second child my first words went unrecorded – but my brother’s were ‘George’ – the next door neighbour who was childless and apparently worked hard on delivered that as the first word! And first phrase was ‘all gone’ – clearly in reference to food – might be appropriate for Rubes too!
Clearly Ruben’s first word would have to be 2.0. Or social graph, something like that… 😛