Today TP ate his yoghurt by himself, without any help from me. I sat while he dipped his spoon in and out of his raspberry yoghurt and shortly after he got bored of the spoon and turned to his hands! It was messy but not as messy as I thought.
Now all I have to do is figure out how to get a video uploaded to here. 
Here’s the link..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wENPNFJR9GI
TP has finally decided that nursery is fun. He will very rarely cry when I leave now and only cries when I arrive to pick him up, me popping in at lunchtime to feed was upsetting him quite a bit and once he started to eat his lunch there I began going in later and later and now I dont go in at all. I do leave milk for him but he is obviously far too busy to drink it and pushes it away in favour of dinner and snacks!
In general, TP’s eating habits have greatly improved. I think because he drinks less milk now, he is eating more and more food. Yoghurt is still by far his favourite and he is quite adept with his spoon these days, only occasionally covering himself in yoghurt on the scoop and when he gets bored with scooping he picks up the bowl and drinks it which is why I’ve taken to serving the yoghurt in his doidy cup!
I’ve introduced a fork aswell and TP is going great guns with it, he tries to stab it into the food which usually ends up with me doing it for him but once the food is on the fork its straight into the mouth and he’s looking for the next bit.
TP seems to have developed quite a bad habit where when he’s had enough to eat, whatever is left gets thrown on the floor, Im assuming its a normal phase – it just seems to be a pretty long phase.
Well Im off to try and figure out how to upload photographs as it is about time I posted one or two!
..since I posted, how time flies! May was a bit of a crazy month, one of TP’s eye teeth poked through and his other top tooth and eye tooth are bulging. Sleep has been much improved, hes gone from waking every 2 hours to waking once, maybe twice a night and has been increasingly sleeping in his own bed all night. Nursery has gone from bad to great, TP didnt cry at all when I dropped him off and picked him up on Thursday but did winge a bit when we were walking out so I guess he had fun. He has really up’d his babbling too and we have a new word of ‘ock which he says when he holds up his sock. Oh, he’s learned to clap his hands and blow kisses and make indian noise (do you know what I mean?) with his hand on his mouth – very cute!
At nursery today lunch smelled so nice, it was curry and rice but TP’s keyworker told me that he would be having pasta because he wouldn’t be able to pick the rice up in his hands. I told her that he would eat the rice without any problems but it was too late for today and then she said that they “obviously” wouldn’t give him curry as he’s too young. Hrmmm, Joe loves a bit of spicy so I told them that next time he can have the curry and the rice because he eats flavoured food with more gusto than the bland food, she seemed somewhat taken aback when I told her that nearly everything TP eats is filled with garlic, spices and herbs. Anyway, its nothing really big I just thought it was a funny comment, I mean surely we aren’t the only parents to give their 11 month old curry and spicy food?
Today TP is off to celebrate his friend, Summer’s 1st birthday and we are very excited! Hopefully, we will have lots of pictures to show when we get back.
Today TP’s Daddy’s friend came around for dinner, he hasn’t eaten a roast in over 2 years (because of travelling) and so roast chicken was on the menu. TP was a star, we put his dinner on his sucker plate and it took over 10 minutes before he decided it was time to take it off the sucker mat and tip it upside down. Despite that he went onto eat chicken, peas (one by one lol!), cauliflower, Yorkshire pudding, roast potato, stuffing and swede, although he did leave some on the table there was nothing on the floor, which is a first in this house. For dessert, we had cheesecake but TP had 5 blueberries, 2 pieces of melon and a pear.
Just over 2 hours later and a milk feed in between he then ate 1 cracker-bread with leftover home-made houmous (I can never spell that!) from yesterday’s lunch (which was Falafel, houmous and pitta bread) and a fruity snack stick thing from Tesco called a Humdinger.
This is a monumental amount of food for TP I wonder how long it will last!
Already bored of giving TP the same breakfasts and trying to let him enjoy a range of new tastes last week we tried home-made pikelets for the first time. Pikelets, you know, those flat crumpets. I found a recipe for them and thought, I can do those and although they didn’t come out looking like shop bought, they tasted rather yummy and TP agreed, he even tried to steal mine!
The recipe for the pikelets is below, the original recipe called for 1/4 cup of sugar which I found made them far too sweet, obviously if you want to add it you can but they taste much better without in my opinion.
Pikelets – makes approx 10 large
Ingredients
1 Egg
3/4 cup of milk
1 cup of standard white flour – I used organic plain, I think white bread flour would work too
1 tsp of baking powder
1/4 tsp lo-salt
25g (1oz) melted butter – I used unsalted. Butter is optional but highly recommended!
Method
Put the flour (recipe calls for sifted – I didn’t and it was ok!), salt & baking powder in a bowl
Beat the egg (and sugar if adding) until thick and then add the milk
Add the egg mixture to the flour mixture and stir then add the melted butter
Mix carefully until smooth (I did it all in my food mixer)
Drop tablespoon fulls of mixture into a lightly oiled (think pancakes) pan or griddle and let cook over a medium heat until a few bubbles appear on top and burst, then turn over with a spatula and cook on the other side until golden brown.
Serve with butter, cream cheese, jam or whatever you fancy! There is no reason why you couldn’t make double quantities and freeze.
So armed with my reliable recipes from the BLW site and a few other places, I created the weeks menu and this is what we have had so far. (I’ve posted the recipes at the bottom of the post.)
Mon – Brekfast:Apple & cinnamon hot cross bun with 2 pieces of nectarine
Lunch: Cheese, carrot & spring onion pitta pocket followed by a few raisins
Dinner: Chicken stir fry and 1/2 conference pear for dessert
Tues – Breakfast: 1/2 weetabix and small bit of banana
Lunch: Savoury Muffins followed by 1 bit of nectarine
Dinner: Vegetable chilli and rice and banana yoghurt for dessert
Weds – Breakfast: 1/2 Blueberry bran muffin
Lunch: Jacket potato with cheese and sweetcorn fritter followed by dried apricot & mango
Dinner: Cheese & spinach quesadilla and strawberry yoghurt (with Plum 4 grain porridge in)
So, Monday & Tuesday’s menu went down well.
While I was in M&S last week I noticed they had an offer on their hot cross buns and as they are a firm fave in our house I took M&S up on their offer of buy one get one half price and bought 1 pack of regular and 1 pack of apple & cinnamon to give them a try, and oo they were yummy! TP (as always) loves his pitta pockets and I thought I would try something different by adding the spring onion which was a rgaing succes! The noodles, again are something he loves – I’m not sure whether he prefers to eat them or swing them around his arm the most though!
Tueday was another day for trying new things on the menu and I made my 1st attempt at savoury muffins, well I followed the cheese & onion recipe and added a few bits to suit us. So I used half red & half regular onions and added a tiny bit of bacon. Yes, I know bacon has alot of salt BUT TP doesn’t really eat that much salt – mostly in bread & cheese and it was a tiny bit to add some flavour, I also threw some carrot in there too because you can never eat too many carrots. Disaster struck when I took my silicone muffin tin from the oven and it bent (as they do!) and I dropped the muffins, so had to start again and cook another batch! Anyway, they came out lovely and tasted so nice they were almost like dumplings that are really crispy on the outside and so soft and melting in the middle – I will definately be making these again! The veg chilli was nice but I think next time I will add more chilli powder as it was a bit mild, and I know TP can stand more heat. Oh, I overcooked the rice so it was nice and soft to mix in with the chilli.
Recipes:
Savoury Muffins – makes 6
Ingredients
5 oz plain flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 large egg
4fl oz milk
2oz cheese – grated
1/2 small red onion
1/2 small regular onion
1/2 strip bacon
1 carrot – grated
Method
Preheat the oven to gas mark 6 and line a muffin tun with 6 muffin cases
Fry the onion (until soft) and bacon – I used a griddle
Sift the flour and baking powder together and put into a bowl
Beat the egg in a jug and add the milk, whisk together
Fold into the flour (don’t over-fold as we want to keep the air in)
Add cheese, onion, bacon and carrot (again, with minimum folding!)
Pour the mixture into the muffin cases and bake for 20 minutes or until golden brown.
Leave to cool (if you can wait that long!).
Vegetable Chilli – makes enough for 1 baby & 1 Mummy
Ingredients
1/2 onion
1/2 pepper
1/2 courgette
couple of mushrooms
1 tsp chilli powder
1 tsp smoked paprika (optional)
1 small tin of kidney beans
1 small tin of tomatoes
water (the amount depends on how thick you like your chilli)
Method
Dice the two halves of onion and fry in olive oil on medium heat until soft and add the chilli powder & smoked paprika if using and continue frying for a minute or 2
Slice or chop the vegetables and add to the pan and cook for a coule of minutes
Add the kidney beans, tomatoes and stir together the add the water to desired thickness
Bring to the boil and simmer for 20 -30 minutes
If you make it too spicy for the baby, you can stir some sour cream or mashed avocado into the chilli to cool it a bit.
Serve with over-cooked long grain rice or put into wraps for burritos!
TP made his Daddy a proud man tonight by eating a burrito. They are somewhat of a tradition in our house, we have them every Tuesday and I make a huge batch for TP’s Daddy to take to work with him the next day, aptly named “Burrito Club” by the guys who he works with – they’re famous you know!!
I haven’t updated for a few days, simply because I’m knackered! I have a bad cold coming and TP has decided that he doesn’t need to sleep and I feel like I’m spending every hour of the day in his nursery trying to get him to sleep! Even now as I type this, he was asleep but as soon as he went in the cot the wake up switch went on and now he’s playing after a 10 minute nap. I don’t know how he does it. :/ I’ve also started a diary to note milk feeds/ food feeds / nap and sleep times.
Anyway, food has been a bit hit and miss over the past few days, I’m not sure if he has some more teeth coming or he’s having a growth spurt. TP has been feeding almost 2 hourly, night time included so something is definitely afoot!
On a brighter note, I tried him with some scrambled eggs again on Thursday (he didn’t like them the first time he tried them) and he really enjoyed them this time, so hooray! Although, I did cheat a little and put cheese in too – he seems to eat anything that has cheese on it.
