16. The fun of feeding

Our kid is coming up on 13 months. One year was a big milestone for us as parents, a moment to look back and reflect. I find myself asking ‘what were we doing on this day last year?’ and marvel at how our world back then was so small and inward-looking compared to today. A walk to the park was a big achievement, and rarely was the baby out of the house for more than an hour.

The biggest tangible change as we passed the anniversary of birth is feeding. As well as the prohibition on salt loosening a little, the first birthday is a waymarker, beyond which they should be getting most of their nutrition from solid food, supplemented with a little cow’s milk. 

So no more formula. No more counting scoops, measuring water, mixing and cooling. No more sterilising of bottles. The steriliser and rack of half a dozen bottles gets packed away, and I look at the counter space that’s been reclaimed and recall those moments standing there at 3am waiting for the kettle to boil, trying to stay in the liminal space where you’re awake enough not to mess up the bottle but not so much you won’t be able to fall back asleep. 

With less concern about salt we can feed him more of our food, and be much more open to eating out of the house. The one year anniversary reminds us that only a year ago we were feeding him every three hours – even waking him up to feed him, and locked into a schedule of pumping, storing, sterilising, and those endless bottles of formula. We never left the house without ready-made formula and sterilised bottles. Longer events and overnights would involve taking the Nuby, flasks and steriliser bags. During the weaning phase we might have all this plus pots of cut fruit, and food suitable for him.

But now we have freedom.

We head to Brighton for an overnight stay with just a banana for the train. When there he shares vegan Thai food, breakfasts on toast, and lunches on rice and beans at a taco joint. We have an early dinner for a special 10th birthday, so we feed him some food before we set off, and then he happily sits in a high chair mainlining chips while we eat. He comes along for lunch at a friend’s place and hoovers up the roast squash. 

Now our biggest challenge becomes filling him up. With formula gone and only about a third of its volume substituted with milk, his appetite soars. Breakfast banana porridge – batch made and frozen in 30ml portions – now becomes a double serving as standard, with a spoonful of nut butter stirred in and lots of fruit alongside it. Even after all of that there’s often a decent go at the granola or toast we’re eating. Servings at lunch and dinner also balloon, and we start adding natural yogurt as a dessert.

His hunger forces something of a regression in self-feeding as he opts for the efficiency of having a parent or grandparent spoon it into his mouth. But his interest in what he’s eating keeps increasing. If the first spoonful is offered without a preview of the bowl, he’ll push your spoon hand away and forcefully pull the other one holding the bowl towards him to inspect the contents. Sometimes after the first mouthful he’ll sit back and applaud. It feels as good as any compliment I’ve ever had from an adult diner, indeed I can now relate to the feeling a contestant gets in Great British Bake Off when they get a ‘Hollywood handshake’. If he also picks up the bowl to lick clean at the end, I feel like I’ve got that elusive third Michelin star.

His repertoire is broad, but if there’s a formula for getting this level of approval, it’s through a dish which has good textural variation, lots of sauce, and a pronounced flavour. Butter beans cooked in a sauce of roasted tomatoes, onion and garlic. Lentils, trout and smashed up peas with some creme fraiche to make it creamy. Barbecued – and nicely spicy – lamb ribs with the meat stripped off the bone, chopped up and mixed with white beans and rice, lubricated with some butter.

All this comes at the same time that two-way communication is really starting to blossom. While his vocabulary of clearly articulated words is still limited to ‘dada’, ‘mama’ and ‘uh-oh’, he now understands so much. Meals are much more fun when the instruction to ‘give some to dada’ works and results in him picking up a piece of bread and feeding it to me. He knows what ‘banana’ means and exactly where to find the bowl of these in the kitchen. Indeed just hearing the word can distract him from what he’s doing and we find ourselves spelling it out or making cryptic references to ‘the yellow fruit’.

With the increasing variety in his diet we sometimes have to teach him new eating skills. We start leaving longer pieces of spaghetti and noodles in his portions, and show him how to suck in a noodle when it’s hanging out of your mouth. I use a different spoon with a deeper bowl to feed him yoghurt, and try to teach him to suck in and get it all off the spoon, performing exaggerated slurping sounds. Perhaps wilfully he gets blowing and sucking the wrong way round and he and I collapse into laughter as he sprays yoghurt over us. If food falls on the floor he says ‘uh oh’, but then blows his cover by saying it before he’s even let go of the item he’s dangling over the edge, preparing to drop. Of course our delight in his emerging personality butts up against the need to teach him good table habits, and we try not to laugh too visibly as we gently direct his cheekiness to places which will involve less food waste.

He enjoys his first olive, samples some pickles and after a couple of goes eats them quite happily. We teach him how to eat corn off the cob. He has a crisp or two, even though overall we are trying to slash our historically high consumption of salty fried snacks, at least when we’re in front of him. He samples some fig with soft cheese and six-pepper jelly. Beetroot on its own sparks indifference, gets tolerated in hummus, but it’s not inhaled at the rate that a straight lemony, garlic hummus is, eaten hungrily straight off the spoon.

With all this, there’s less cooking just for him. We still keep the freezer stocked with portioned rice, lentils and beans, but these are more often paired with something that we’re eating. Our cooking adapts to create his meals – making a crab linguine for us means saving some garlic infused crab sauce to make an omelette for him the next day.

But it’s not all fancy stuff. Rice with unsalted butter and egg is a staple which is always eagerly consumed. When he’s unwell a simple congee made with chicken stock and ginger becomes the go-to. 

We pick up a second-hand helper tower so he can stand next to us when we’re cooking, and see what’s going on. We help him with his first attempts at stirring things, give him the stainless steel bowls and wooden tools which make the loudest sound, and I focus on rebuilding my muscle memory around my workspace to ensure the knives are always beyond his reach. His attention span lasts about as long as it takes to stir some tomato sauce and mascarpone into a bowl of pasta, and then he’s either trying to eat it there and then, or to climb out of the top of the tower onto the hob. It will take a while before he’s a help rather than a massive source of potential danger to be managed, but I’m loving these first steps of him participating in the process of keeping him and the house well fed.