I was nervous about Stage 3/4 foods for Allie when she’s ready to move beyond the purees, because I wasn’t sure how to prepare finger foods and “real foods” fresh every day when I’m at work all day except for the 1.5 hours or so I get with her after work until her bedtime. But what I’ve been doing is making a one-pot meal en masse that usually has some sort of grain (typically brown rice and/or quinoa, or tiny semolina pasta) made into a porridge with fresh veggies (carrots, peas, edamame, green beans, corn, tomato puree) and a meat (beef, fish). Then I freeze them into 1.5 to 2 oz portions in silicon ice cube trays and she’s good for about a week. I try to give her a different one-pot dish for lunch from her dinner, and I add to each frozen dish some extra veggies as I get them (freshly cut, steamed, frozen), chopped bell peppers, broccoli, carrots, asparagus, zucchini. Sometimes she gets the extra veggies on the side as finger food. Jayne has never had a problem feeding her. She gets fresh seasonal fruit after each meal that Mr. W cuts up for her in the morning as I select and place her frozen foods in serving bowls to thaw out for the day’s feedings. All the day’s food prep is done before we get her from her crib each weekday morning. Snacks are kind of left up to Jayne’s pleasure, with some suggestions from me. Allie sometimes gets tiny baby waffles that are frozen like Eggos, heated in the toaster oven, which would be dipped in Greek yogurt, hummus, or eaten with a scrambled egg that Jayne would make. Sometimes it’s half a slice of sprouted whole wheat bread with Colby cheese bits. Sometimes it’s veggies and fruit. She drinks her cow’s milk from a straw and water from a sippy cup, still gets 3 servings of breast milk daily (nursing morning and bedtime, plus a bottle after the first nap or nursing when I’m home). Nutrition must be adequate; Allie’s pooping regularly, 2-3 times a day, and I think she shot up a couple more inches in the past month as her head is now well above the tops of our living room baby gates/blockades. The seats on our couches come up to her waist. She’s now attempting to climb, getting a knee up on the couch, but unsure of how to get her other leg up from there. She uses her underfoot toys as stepstools but hasn’t realized she could move a toy to where she wants to go and use that as a step, yet. *keeping fingers crossed that she doesn’t figure this out anytime soon*

Brain development is fascinating. Based on what I’ve learned in reading The Wonder Weeks, Allie is now at the development of “programs.” She understands a whole series of events and can put them together and control the outcome. Something as simple as, “Allie, where’s your sock? Get your sock and I’ll put it on for you” is pretty complicated when you think about the process. The above is what I said to her when I happened to see that she’d taken a sock off at some point in her play and had left it by some toys in the living room. So her response was to put her hands palm up like a shrug, as if to say she doesn’t know where her sock is, then walk around leaning forward so that her face is closer to the ground, as if to say, “I’m looking for it.” She walked around for a bit with her hands raised up, then spotted the sock. The hands went down, she ran to it, picked it up, brought it back to me, and then waited for me to pick her up and place her in my lap to put the sock on. In order to get to this point, she has to first understand what a sock is, that it is separate from her, understand distances, that she can bridge the distance, she has to stick out her hand toward it and move her fingers in a gripping fashion to pick it up, and then she has to remember to bring that sock to me and have me help her put it on. All of that were learned in bits and pieces in her development for the past year. Her being able to understand “programs” is handy in that we can now just say, “Ready for your nap?” “Ready to go night-night?” and she’d stop her playing, run around to the gate at the stairs, and pull on it, waiting for us to open it so she could step through and make her way upstairs to her room.

Her memory development is a cool thing to observe, too. Last night, for example, she was having her bath using an organic home-milled chamomile baby soap I’d purchased from a friend’s wife who handmakes all her organic products (Moxie Organix, if any of you are interested). Allie pointed to the soap bar and said, “Baya!”
Mr. W corrected her, “Soap. Not banana. Soap.”
“Bayaya,” she insisted.
Looking at the bar, the translucent cream color does bear an uncanny resemblance to banana flesh, albeit shaped differently.
“No, soap.”
“Baya.”
“Soap.”
“Baya.”
After she was taken out of her bath, dried off, diaper put on, she ran back into the bathroom where Mr. W still was, and pointed at the bar.
“Bayaya!”
“Soap.”
“Baya.”
“Soap.”
An application of lotion later, she was put in her fleece footsie jammies, said her goodnights to Mr. W, nursed, and as I started to move her off the Boppy to place her in her crib, she pointed at the bathroom door and said with all seriousness, “Baya.”
“You’re still on that?”
She went in her crib, played for the usual 20 minutes or so until she went to sleep. 11 hours go by. We go in her room to pick up a standing, smiling Allie from her crib. “Good MORning, sweetheart!”
*point* “Baya.” The way she smiles mischievously when she says “baya” tells us she’s deliberately telling us it’s a banana even thought she knows it’s not, so it’s a game to her.

“One” rhymes with “fun.” And she is lots of it.