Big animals

We took Nathaniel to the Gloucester County 4-H Fair on Sunday morning (before it got too busy or too hot). It was his first visit with large creatures like cows, horses and such.

He seemed a little interested in the bunny rabbits and slighly impressed with the cows. Then we went to see some horses, and a LARGE horse whinnied loudly about a foot away from Nathaniel ... and Nathaniel definitely took notice. He wasn't scared. He was a little more shocked at the sound and how loud it was, then he stared, wide-eyed, at the horse for a little while longer wondering if he'd do it again.

We moved along to the goats and pigs area, where Nathaniel found something more to his likeing: A pair of fuzzy little three-week-old goats. The goats wanted to see Nathaniel (they stuck their heads out of the pen) and Nathaniel wanted a closer look at them (he longingly reached out to rub their fuzzy heads).

We figured touching the goats wasn't the best idea for our little guy and his habit of putting his hands in his mouth all the time. But then the goats' keepers came along. A pair of youngsters maybe 3-years-old and 5-years-old. The younger boy saw Nathaniel trying to reach for the goat. He pleasantly and innocently said to us: "He can touch one if he wants."
I replied: "No, our little guy licks his hands too much."
The young boy, obviously not concerned with how that would impact the goat, told me: "That's OK."

I'm not sure he understood we were more worried about the goat making Nathaniel sick than about Nathaniel doing something to hurt the goat.

Ah, the innocence of kids.

Food reactions

Nathaniel has had no negative reactions to his solid foods so far. Sure, his poop has given us some iffy reactions (oh, for the good old days of formula poop ... or at least sweet potato poop, which looks about the same), but his ingesting of foods hasn't been a problem.

-- We started with sweet potato ... worked fine. (My review: The best we've given him)
-- We moved on to sweet peas ... he seemed OK with them. (My review: Least appetizing, least flavor, but Nathaniel didn't seem to mind.
-- We're giving him bananas now. He seems to like them, and I think they're OK. Amanda, on the other hand, has had bad reactions to bananas. She's disgusted by the overly sweet mush and the strong, sweet smell. I pointed out to her that it's odd she has no problem with his poop but the bananas almost make her gag ... but she didn't seem to find my observation as interesting as I found it. Oh well.

Anyway, the little guy is doing fantastic. His biggest problem of late: He's really good at rolling over. It's not uncommon for him to roll over in his sleep, then wake up and get upset at the fact that someone apparently put him down on his belly. He then lets us know he doesn't appreciate this practical joke we've played on him. (During the daytime, he easily rolls back over from his belly if he chooses to ... at night, perhaps he loses that ability.)

This actually helped recently when the alarm clock didn't go off and I was about 20 minutes late to wake up ... Nathaniel squawked, I woke up and ran off to work, barely getting in on time. Great job, little guy.

Hmmm. Having some photo issues, but here's a fun one from late last week. He picked up the paper himself and started looking at it ... then he moved toward trying to eat it, at which point I stopped him:

No peas please

Nathaniel has a bib that says "No Peas Please." The thing is, he doesn't seem to mind them.

We moved to peas this week as the No. 2 solid food for him to try. Other than making an unhappy face the moment they touch his lips, he seems to have no problem eating them all. I, on the other hand, am not interested. I smelled them yesterday after we briefly warmed them in the microwave (very low power, very short time -- as suggested on the jar itself) ... and they smelled terrible.

Then I tasted a tiny amount (to make sure they wouldn't burn the little guy), and they tasted ... like nothing at all. There was pretty much no flavor.

Amanda keeps telling me we can't let Nathaniel think it's OK to not eat something we feed him, so I'm not allowed to express a dislike of peas to the little guy. Fair enough.

Still, I think he and I both are looking forward to butternut squash soon.

NOTE: Sorry for the lack of photos recently. It's just a little bit time consuming, and Nathaniel likes to take up my time whenever possible. I'll try to get some new-ish photos up soon.

Taste test: Sweet potato

So we're moving on to some other solid foods now.

Amanda suggested sweet potato would be a good start because, unlike the rice cereal, sweet potato is filled with fiber, which should help with the constipation. I also figured Nathaniel would love something that had a new and different flavor.

Not so much.

He seemed pretty disinterested with the new flavor. He actually is much happier with the rice cereal.

I figured I'd try out the new food real quick to see what the problem was, and the fact is: It's pretty tasty. It's basically mashed sweet potato -- who wouldn't like that?

Nathaniel eventually ate a full jar over two days ... but he still seems to prefer rice cereal. I'm guessing that will change soon enough.

Grunting baby

Ever since we fed Nathaniel some semi-solid, rice-cereal-mixed-with-formula gruel recently, he'd been grunting away.

We read in the "What to Expect" that when a baby first gets a cough, he or she will often continue to cough for a while after the cause of the cough clears up ... it seems they just enjoy making a new and different sound.

Nathaniel did that a few weeks ago -- he coughed randomly and often for a period after a little sickness went away. Then he learned to squeal/scream at a high pitch, and continued to make that sound for a while for no reason.

Now he's grunting. He was a little constipated after the first solid foods, and he was grunting away that evening. Now he just seems to love grunting. At day care, one of the staffers said she was afraid Nathaniel was going to blow his diaper out. Most of the time, however, we check the diaper after the grunt-fest, and he hasn't even gone to the bathroom.

Kids these days.

Solid food lesson

Nathaniel is feeling much better these days. Since he's 5 months old as of July 2, we decided to get into solid foods again.

We tried rice cereal and formula a week or two ago, and it felt pointless. The "recipe" called for one tablespoon of rice cereal to five of formula. The result was we were spooning soup into his mouth. This stuff wasn't solid in the slightest.

So we did that a couple of times and decided to make it a little thicker. We did two tablespoons of cereal to four of formula. The result was a thin gruel that Nathaniel seemed to love! Sure, it got all over his face, but he nonetheless opened his mouth wide as the food approached and kicked away happily while eating.

But later in the day we learned why you start with the soup ...
It seems his belly isn't used to solids. A few hours later he was straining and appeared to be constipated. He did not seem happy. He was fine fairly quickly, but we've learned our lesson: liquid-like solids for now.

UPDATE: The Enfamil people say we should not refrigerate the formula powder ... no explanation of why, just that we shouldn't do it. Strange.