The Great Self-Feeding Experiment

The Grubster eats a lot.  That statement can be interpreted in two ways, and both apply.  She eats large quantities of food, and she eats on a frequent basis.

As of right now, I am basically serving her four meals a day.  We have breakfast when she wakes up (9am), first lunch before nap (12:30pm), second lunch after nap (4:30pm) and dinner (7pm) every day.  Once in a while one of the lunches is more snack-like, but there is never any telling as to how much she will eat.  And since she generally demands a variety of foods at each of these four meals, my on-the-spot culinary skills are unparalleled these days.  Thank God for the internet, which has a wealth of recipes and information relative to feeding toddlers!

This week, I was gauging her level of hunger for first lunch before her nap.  Thinking she was too tired to invest herself in a full meal, I handed her a cup of milk and a couple of puffs, and spooned some yogurt into a small bowl.  I figured it would fill her up enough so that she'd take a decent nap, and then we'd have a real lunch after she woke up.

I stepped into the living room to grab my phone off the end table.  JK usually texts me when he is on his way home, so I wanted to think ahead to what we could eat for lunch after Monica was asleep.  And when I got back, I found this:

 

Her high chair has this attached semi-tray that you see in the picture, as well as the removable full-sized tray.  Since she started eating finger foods, we ALWAYS have the full-sized tray on the high chair.  She hasn't had a meal without the full-sized tray since we started having meals in the dining room several months ago; which is why I had never before encountered this situation. 

Without the full-sized tray, Monica can reach out and grab whatever is close by on the dining room table.  In this case, happened to be the yogurt bowl and spoon. 

I decided to let her have at it and just see what happened.  She has tried to take a spoon out of my hand to feed herself some of whatever I was spooning onto her tray, but she never gets any food into her mouth that way.  She isn't quite ready to balance the spoon in a way that food won't slide off of it before it gets to her mouth.

Luckily for her, yogurt is sticky, and it stuck to the spoon.  All she had to do was stick the spoon in the bowl, and then stick the spoon in her mouth.  I was amazed and impressed that she was actually eating so much of the yogurt.  And boy, was she proud of herself....I had to refill the little bowl three times!  I'm not entirely sure that she was even that hungry, I think she was just showing off her sweet skills. 

Ahhhhh, this independent little baby isn't that much of a baby anymore!!!