Adventures in Self-Feeding

Now that SJ is seven months old, I've been giving him opportunities to feed himself.  So far, he isn't big on the ideas of pincer grasps, feeding himself, eating table foods, and not choking.  Here are some of the adventures in self-feeding for SJ!

First, I tried some soft fruit pieces since he adores those in the net feeder.  We tried ripe strawberries, and SJ was really excited about the concept:

Unfortunately, he was not quite as excited about the reality:

Then, we tried some soft pieces of banana.  Bananas are SJ's favorite fruits in the baby food genre, so I was sure this would work well for him.  

Again, very excited about the idea...

 

Not so excited about the reality ... again.

 (He is not actually choking on a piece of banana here, although he had choked on his one and only bite previously.  Here, he's gagging at the very thought of eating another piece of banana... he gagged for several minutes after his one bite of banana was fished out of his mouth!)

Then, Daddy got the bright idea to give SJ another one of the world's best healthy foods ... a Cheeto Puff.  SJ was very pumped about it!

 He loved the whole idea of the puff!

 Eh... again, maybe this was not a good idea.

 

 What is this crazy thing?

 I'm just going to put this down now...

Then, I saw a Baby Mum Mum on Erin's blog.  I thought I'd let SJ try the Mum Mum and see how that went.

   He did okay with it - only a little choking, and he was able to feed it to himself...

 

But he didn't really seem to actually like it.

Last week, after Katie Anne's school party, we gave SJ a bit of leftover cupcake.  Now, this is what he was talking about!  Finally, a bit of table food that he could sink his teeth (well, gums) into!  

 But, feeding yourself with your little chub fingers is hard work.

 You do crazy things like crush the cupcake into dust or miss your mouth and put the cupcake on your chin. 

 Why do so much work when there's someone willing to do it for you?  Big sister KA is more than happy to stand beside the high chair and feed bites of birthday cupcake to her baby bird.

 Who can deny the birthday princess and her baby brother when this arrangement obviously makes them both so happy?

SJ will probably be a million pounds by the time he's 5, but look how sweet they are together!