Does eating solids help baby sleep through the night?

Ahh, the eternal question of how to get your baby to sleep through the night... I've been pondering it for months now. E has always been a bad sleeper. Well, not always. She started sleeping through the night (from 11pm to 6am) at about a month old. And as is typical for babies that age, she had no problem falling asleep during the day, although I remember her mostly napping in my arms. Around three months old, she started waking up twice a night. Since then her typical night is to fall asleep between 7:30 and 8pm, wake up between 11 and 1 and then again anywhere from 3 to 5 and then up for the day around 7:30 or 8am. A lot of interrupted sleep for mommy and baby (and daddy, too). Her napping has gotten progressively worse, too. A 30 minute nap is the norm, when I can get her to nap at all.

When you have a baby that doesn't sleep, you get a lot of "advice" on how to get her to sleep. One very common piece of advice is to feed the baby rice cereal or table food to "satisfy" her. The phrasing of that one really gets my goat. But, as much as I hate to admit it, the past two nights, E has been sleeping much better. First she woke at 2 and 6:30 (at which point she was up for the day), and last night she only woke once, at 5:15 (and went back to sleep for another 2 hours!). No significant improvement on the nap front, but a well-rested mommy can handle a nap-free day much better than an exhausted one.

 We'll see how it goes from here. Who knows? Maybe the last two nights have been a fluke, or maybe just a coincidence. But I'm going to cross my fingers and hope that, whatever the cause, she continues to sleep well at night.

Squeaches

Now that E has a few foods in her repertoire, I've started mixing fruits and veggies together. My reasons are several: 1. Variety 2. She seems to be more receptive to some flavors when they're mixed with flavors she's already familiar with.

This morning we tried peaches on their own. No go. So I gave her peach and banana with rice cereal, which she was happy to eat. Tonight for dinner, she was supposed to have butternut squash with rice cereal... I think now is a good time to remind any other parents making their own baby food to LABEL EVERYTHING. Lots of purees look alike, especially the orange ones. This is, of course, my way of saying that I grabbed the peaches instead of the squash. But that's not all, folks. I grabbed the squash, too, thinking I had two containers of the same thing. And mixed them both into the rice. Only when I noticed the different colors did I realize what I'd done. Since it was already mixed together, I figured I'd see what happened. Magic, that's what happened. She LOVED her squeaches and rice.

First foods

It's been six long months, but little E has finally started solid foods! In preparation for the big day, I bought an 11-cup food processor and a bunch of freezer trays with lids. My plan was/is to make a new food as close to every night as possible. So every night I steam or bake up a new fruit or veggie, puree it and freeze it. The next day, I put the frozen food in a freezer bag, labeled with food and the date. The freezer trays get washed and I make the next batch.

So far I've made:
- Sweet Potato
- Butternut Squash
- Carrot (notice a color scheme?)
- Apple
- Pear
- Peaches

Up next:
- Peas
- Blueberries

The one thing they don't seem to tell you in any of the make-your-own-food resources I've seen is the consistency for first foods. So after a terribly failed attempt at sweet potatoes (waaaaaay too thick), I went to the store to see what jarred baby food looks like. Turns out, it's super watery. I also tried giving her rice cereal (the one thing I've not made on my own), which had a serving suggestion for baby's first meal. The ratio was 3:1 water to rice. Once I got the consistency down I started mixing one veggie or fruit with the cereal. Success!

I've also started taking notes when I see jars of baby food for flavor combination to try at home. But more on that later.