Three Cheers for Cereal!

Molly made her first foray in to the world of solid food this week -- she had her first taste of rice cereal! As with Max, I opted to wait until Molly was on the older end of the acceptable age range for starting solids. She was definitely ready and enjoyed sucking down the cereal and chewing on the spoon. She wasn't as adept as Max was on his first cereal attempt -- that boy chowed it down like he'd been doing it for weeks. Molly is big on grabbing things lately, so it was a bit of a challenge to get the spoon in her mouth before she grabbed it away from you. After the first few bites, she was "feeding" herself. She made a proper good mess and had to have a post-cereal bath.

Molly has been a terrible sleeper for the past month or so. She had been sleeping pretty well up until she caught her first cold and then started teething -- after that, she went from sleeping 5-8 hours at a stretch to sleeing 1 1/2 - 2. As you can imagine, getting up every two hours with a six-month-old baby who may or may not decide to go back to sleep gets a little draining. I'm happy to report that either the want ad or the cereal seems to have prompted an amazing sleep improvement. After the second night of cereal, Molly slept seven hours in a row, woke up to eat, and then went back to sleep for another three hours. I woke up in a panic in the middle of the night and had to get up to check on her to make sure she was ok (I'm afraid even the Angelcare monitor isn't enough to totally ease my mom paranoia). She didn't sleep quite as well on the third night of cereal, but she didn't eat as well either. It appears that Dad was right and our little chunk needed some more sustenance!

So, after Molly has a couple of weeks to get used to cereal, I'll be back in the baby food-making business! I suppose it is a good thing that we had to clean out all the expired breast milk from the freezer, since that will leave me more room to fill it up with homemade baby food. ;) Strained peas anyone?