Baby-led weaning

So we are just letting Caroline feed herself.  This is known as baby-led weaning.  Some of it makes it into her belly (and beyond).  But she loves it and I cannot see how we'd spoon feed.  She loves spoons when she can hold them and eat them though.

Video of Caroline vs. Avocados.

Hope this video works for folks!

Add some fun with bananas and yams.  BLW is hella messy but we feed her right before bedtime.  I wear gross clothes.  It is fun.

Party Dresses

Yesterday I co-hosted a party with Melanie and Marisa for Beth Provenzano and her new baby Catherine.

She is a sweet little 7-week old.  Below are Beth and Lauren (her second baby girl), and her big lady Margaret in their gorgeous pink party frocks.

It was a nice party!  Caroline got to wear two party dresses (she spit up on the first one so got to do a wardrobe change halfway through). She looked super cute in a Peaz n Carrots hand me down.

Here is my silly girl when Dad got home.  She was in the best spirits all day.  Just love this little lady.

5 Months Old

Growing and growing.  Caroline's new skills and abilities are very noticeable these days.  One month ago, she could barely grab things, and now she grabs items, moves them around, and accurately brings everything to her mouth.  She has also shown a ton of interest in our food recently, so I've been sharing my bananas with her, and this week she also had some avocado!

We'll likely just give her what we eat and try and skip the purees for the most part.  However I did mash up the avocado after she played with it for a while and gave her some with a spoon.  She was way more interested in the spoon and bowl than what was on it of course.  We'll see if her interest in food itself grows in the coming weeks.  I do know that there will be lots of mess in our future.  I already threw out the dining room rug.

Just last night in her bath (**heavily supervised**) Caroline grabbed onto the side of the tub and stood up. Freaky how this girl just figures things out.  Looks like we'll have to move the crib mattress down soon.  Because this is how tall she is when standing in it (posed of course).

I even snapped a pic of her sitting!  She is practicing still.  She cannot get to sitting position on her own yet, nor can she prevent the back tippage, but she can prevent the side tippage if she concentrates.

We attempted a 5 month photo shoot and it didn't quite work out, so we'll try again.  Will leave you all with  one shot of her dressed and clean.

Portrait time

By now many of you have seen a snippet from our attempt at taking a photo of the three girls.  By some accounts it was unsuccessful.  But I happen to love these.  From the beginning where Matt and Kris try and get the twins to stay put, straight to the end, I will let the photographs speak for themselves.

We did manage to get a good pic of Nana and the twins though!

And a few of Kris and her babies.

And I could never leave out the big cheese.  As photogenic as always!

Missing my family already!  See you in June.

A dainty eater and a messy eater

Smash cakes.  Aptly named.  Watching kids try cake for the first time is usually entertaining.  Watching Leah and Sophie did not disappoint.  First we sang to Leah (older by one minute).

Then Soph.

A first taste.

And they dig in.

Leah:

And Sophie:

At the end.  Sophie is clearly a mess.  Leah, pretty dainty.

Final results!