Solid foods and sleeping snags

I've been making solid food purees for Max this week and find the whole process quite enjoyable. Something about finite tasks with a specific order of operations is soothing and satisfying for me. I discovered this at my first job as a concessionist at a movie theatre when I found myself happy at the prospect of making the hot dogs. Scoff if you must, but I really liked checking the internal temp on all the franks and once they were ready loading them into the soft warm hot dog buns that had been steaming in the drawer and then putting them into their little foil sleeves and folding the edge over neatly. I loved it- and compared to most of the other duties it was positively delightful. But I digress......
So far Max has eaten avocado, butternut squash, and acorn squash. (All organic) and he has seemed to enjoy them all, (next is parsnip!). It's so easy and simple to take a cube or two out of the freezer in the morning and put it in a cup to thaw for his little "meal" later in the morning/afternoon.

He gets really messy, naturally, and makes the most ridiculous faces- you wouldn't believe. He curls his tongue forward into his bottom lip and also does the little deep cup curl with his tongue. He tucks in his bottom lip ALOT while eating and ends up with a little "soul patch" of food pretty much the whole time. Then with his lip tucked under he starts to make chewing motions but combined with a little suction so his lips pop. It's really funny- I never could have predicted all the stuff this kid does.


I shortly thereafter put his little lap table thing across the high chair but before I could he kept bending nearly double to chew on the pommel thing on his chair- getting squash all over it and himself in the process of course. I think he's teething and so he really likes to chew on just about anything right now given half the chance.

Overall the food thing seems to be a success- I know I started food a while back but we took a break because I didn't have anything organic and I kind of wanted to wait until he was closer to six months to really get going. Now he seems really pretty happy about it and reaches for food and spoons all the time- and my water.

In other news, his sleep sessions have been a little squirrely lately. Some days he'll take two one hour naps and then others he'll barely manage two half hour naps before bedtime which then is much earlier. You would think that if a baby normally goes down at 7 and wakes around 5:30 that he would sleep later if he didn't go down until 8 one night but it's not the case.

Sometime between 5 and 6 is pretty much standard for him no matter when he goes down. Usually if he goes down early he just ends up getting more sleep and that's great- but then every now and then he'll go down at 6 and then be up at 4. yuck.

We do our best to keep him up until his usual bedtime, but there's only so much distraction you can manage before he just goes to sleep on you and he'd be miserable the whole time.

And of course, last night he went down like normal around 7 but then he was up and crying at 1:09 this morning! It was such aberrant behavior for him that I figured something must be wrong or off in some way so I went to check on him and ended up nursing him and putting him back to bed. I felt a little like a pushover, but there was something about his cry that "remound" me of the time he woke up with a fever so I thought maybe it was teething discomfort that had woken him. We'll see how tonight goes......