The Wide World of Solids

Vivian's days of nursing have been numbered.  The army has numbered them.  In a couple of months I'll be leaving for a mandatory three weeks of training, and she'll be staying behind with family.  At first I thought I'd just keep doing this whole pumping thing.  There was a time when I would have said that my unit was being really supportive of the whole soldier mom thing.  Unfortunately, that time has passed.  My baby girl is being weaned.  

The first day went pretty poorly.  There's nothing quite like starting off the day with your baby clinging to you sobbing because you won't feed her, and she's too little to understand why.  I mean obviously I tried feeding her a bottle.  It was rejected.  I tried the oatmeal cereal.  Also rejected.  Finally I managed to coerce her into eating some banana and nursed her.  That's pretty much the story of the last two days.  I approach with a bottle of formula, and she starts writhing around in front of me and squealing as though I'm approaching with an instrument of torture.  Actually the squealing has been eliminated because she's learned to not open her mouth to emit any noise lest I seize the opportunity to do something disgusting like try and actually place the bottle's nipple in her mouth.  If the bottle does come in contact with her mouth there's an immediate reaction of screaming like she's just been fed a caustic substance, and a renewed effort to thrash around so that the bottle is inevitably knocked free from her mouth and shoots formula all over both of us.  So much fun.  We tried having Justin give her a bottle.  Rejected.  We tried formula in her sippy cup.  Rejected.  In a regular glass.  Rejected.  She simply hates the stuff.  So, we're left with nothing to do but wean her to solids.  She's still not pleased with the idea of being given solids when she's clearly wanting to nurse, but it is going marginally better than my attempts at moving her to formula.  Here's some pictures I snapped from today's breakfast: 

For breakfast, clothes don't seem to be a great idea.  We go straight from the high chair to the tub.

I sometimes worry that she's not going to get enough to eat, but since she can effectively hide her diaper from view just by leaning over I figure we've still got some time before I need to really start worrying.  This is her craning over to see the food that she's just knocked onto the floor.

Trying to act like she doesn't see me offering a spoonful of oatmeal cereal.

This is the reaction to some pears I was trying to offer her as a reward for eating most of the oatmeal cereal.  She is a tiny bit dramatic.

She's not trying to retrieve those little bits of food, she's trying to sweep them to the floor.

Then she decided that breakfast was over.

Looks like from here on out she'll be wearing that 5-point harness.

This has not been the funnest thing that she or I have ever done, and I'm pretty sure that we both hate it equally, but thankfully outside of mealtime she seems to be relatively unaffected by this latest little transition.  She started walking a while back, and is content to cruise around the house creating messes, and happily chattering to herself everywhere she goes.