At Jameson’s 9 month appointment a few weeks ago, the doctor told us that we could now give Jameson whatever we wanted (except honey). Even eggs were on the list of “whatever we wanted”. He then qualified that the choking hazard was our responsibility (as if we weren’t already well aware of that).

We immediately decided to give him some eggs to try the very next day while Brian and I ate breakfast. Then we gave him some lasagna noodles at our visit to Brian’s grandma.

Then we got lazy, and just started giving him Cheerios in addition to his usual melt-in-the-mouth puffs, yogurt drops and mum mums.

It was about another week or two before we started saving some of our dinners for him to have as leftover finger foods.

This past week, we’ve tried to give Jameson finger food as a dinner supplement every night. We usually start off with some baby food and then give him finger foods to stuff in his face.

And he does stuff his face. The child that was always a picky eater doesn’t seem to have any problem stuffing his own face. I should’ve known, considering he tries to eat everything in sight (socks, leaves, grass, pumpkins, dog toys, rugs, clothes, furniture…).

He hoards pieces like a chipmunk and stuffs his face until he sometimes gags a little. Having read a little bit about how babies manage their food, the gagging is tolerable to me (it helps them bring their food back to the front of their mouth). In fact, he rarely gags at all now, so I let him go for the most part.

What does give me a minor heart attack is the new half-laugh he has discovered. He sucks in his breath like a loud wheeze and holds it for a second. He does it with or without food in his mouth, and it gets me every time. I’m hoping that particular sound will lose its novelty real soon.

A few weeks prior to the doctors appointment when he was around 8-1/2 months, we had already started giving him thicker baby food in preparation for finger foods.

The reason for our preparation was that our neighbors had been told by their doctor that around 9 months babies should start eating whatever the adults are eating, so we were preparing for that. It turns out, our doctor is a lot more casual in that regard and didn’t really care what we did. Presumably, all babies eat regular food in good time… you don’t see adults eating baby food (except the crazies).

We started out with a stage 2-1/2 food that we found at Wal-Mart which is a perfect mix between stage 2 and 3, which seemed too thick for Jameson to tolerate. I also mixed some of my homemade baby food into the pureed stuff to make some thicker.

We did this for a couple weeks before giving him finger foods, but I am not sure that we really needed to since Jameson took so well to eating on his own.

Now we do pureed to chunky to finger foods and everything in between. We have daycare feed him the easy stuff while we experiment at home in the evenings.

Jameson was not a big fan of the stage 3 corn. I am just glad we have Sasha to clean up after him.

P.S. We still don’t have the hang of all eating together, since Jameson goes to bed at 7. But we did have a successful first dinner, all together (even Sasha), last Saturday, celebrating Sasha’s birthday (belated) with a steak. She got a little one too (Jameson didn’t).