Miss Independent

Eating a Mum Mum

As Olivia is going on 10 months, she is becoming more and more independent by the day. About two weeks ago, she decided she would no longer let us feed her pureed baby food. She would scream, cry, and generally make our meal time a very stressful experience. I decided to start letting her eat all finger foods and she is now a very messy, but happy camper. She really does a pretty good job of picking up her food and putting it in her mouth, although judging by the picture below, it doesn't look like it. :)

Speaking of eating, she has been eating like a horse lately. I thought maybe she was going through a growth spurt and that being a bottomless pit would only last a few days, but this new found shoving-food-in-her-face business shows no signs of slowing down. She's so busy crawling around (on all fours), pulling herself up on everything and now, climbing stairs, that she must be burning a lot of calories and working up an appetite.

She seems to love fruit, especially nectarines. She's been eating bananas, cantaloupe, peaches, sweet potatoes, cheese, turkey and ham lunchmeat, puffs, mum mums (see picture at the top), and some homemade turkey meatballs packed with all those veggie purees that I have stored in the freezer. So far, she's not a picky eater for which I am grateful.

In other news, Olivia is a genius! ;) She "read" the word yum-yum in one of her little lift-the-flap books. On this page it says, "This little baby is hungry." When you lift the flap, it shows the little girl eating and the words say "yum-yum." When I turned to the page and lifted the flap,she said yum-yum all on her own. I was so surprised and excited. I ran to the office to tell Yusaku and when we got to that page, she performed her little trick again. So, it wasn't just a fluke! She did it again the next day for my mom!  Granted, she doesn't do it every time, but that's okay. I still know she's a smartypants!