Baby-led solids part 3: the cuteness

You’ve heard about why.  And you’ve heard about how.  Now do you wanna see what it looks like??  Well feast your eyes.

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Dropping the F-bomb

BLW Part I: The Whys

BLW Part II: The Hows

 

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Baby-led solids part two: the hows

This is part two of a 3-part series on baby-led solids/weaning (BLW) in honour of Lady Fair’s half-year birthday and consequent move away from exclusive breastfeeding.  In part 1 we talked about some of the great reasons to do it, and now we’ll go over some practical tips.  The thing about BLW is that it really doesn’t require instructions beyond “give food to the baby”, but people who are used to pureeing usually want some more details, so here they are.

Size & Shape

The main thing about BLW is that the kids are putting the food in their mouths themselves, and they’re starting well before they work out that little pincer grip.  In other words, dicing is no-dice.  It’s all about the long-skinny so that they can wrap their whole adorable little fist around it and still have an end poking out to get in their mouths.

My favourites for novice eaters are bananas halved lengthwise, avocados cut into longitudinal wedges and broccoli trees.  Once they get older and more coordinated, brussels sprouts and scrambled egg yolks are pretty grabable.

Meat always seems to present a difficulty.  Some people cut it into really narrow long strips, but my kiddo couldn’t figure out how to flop it into his mouth.  He also had front teeth very early, so he’d bite a chunk off and then not be able to chew it and problems would ensue.  So I went Alicia Silverstone on it and pre-chewed, then propped it up in a little pile on his plate.  Gross, but effective.

Grip

As scary and weird as it seems, try to leave peels and rinds on when possible.  Bananas are a perfect example.  If you take the peel off, that nanner will fly out of baby’s hand like the escargot out of Julia Roberts’ in Pretty Woman.  Apples with a skinless landing strip around the equator and peel at each pole are easy to hold onto and run your gums over.  If you’re into grains you can also try dusting food with some sort of cereal crumb.

Out & About

First off, BLW makes travelling way easier, and being lazy, that makes me very happy.  But what you need to plan/bring changes more rapidly than with pureed food.

If baby is only a few days/weeks onto solids then the biggest question is really whether or not baby actually needs to eat (other than nursing, obviously) while you’re out.  Remember the rule of thumb “before 1 it’s just for fun.”  Kids really don’t need to be having three squares a day.  In fact, in the first couple of weeks they’re unlikely to swallow enough to make the endeavor calorically worthwhile anyway.  So there’s the nothing option.

But if your wee one is firmly into the eating world, avocados, bananas and brussels sprouts all travel well and make relatively little mess.  For more adventurous babies, order the soup and bread and share dipped bread with them.  Alternatively, bits from a garden salad or side baked potato do wonders.  And my all-time food court favourite? Sushi rolls.  They’re mouthful sized, nutritious and TIDY.

IKEA Antilop Highchair

Bibs = useless. Think ‘full coverage’.

Clean-up

And speaking of tidiness… you know all of those little wee bibbies you were given?  Forget them.  Truly.  So useless.  If you must use a cover, then the IKEA full-body smock is the only rational option, but I prefer to strip baby bare.  Much easier to swab a baby than wash and fold a stack of smocks.  And while we’re at it, the more elaborate your high-chair, the more crevices there are to stick food in.  IKEA comes in handy here again with their smooth plastic, single piece, TWENTY DOLLAR high chair.  Can’t be beat.

Safety

These really should go for all early experiments with food, no matter how you introduce it.  The first item on the safety list, is to know the difference between gagging and choking.  Both look horrible and can make you panic.  One – gagging – tends to be noisy, while the other – choking – is silent.  So don’t ever turn your back on baby and assume you’ll hear her choking because you won’t.  Ultimately, the qualifier is air.  If baby is gagging, he can still breathe in between gags, which makes noise.  If baby is making noise (and thus breathing) you should NOT go smacking her on the back because that could make the offending bit of food block the currently unobstructed airway and cause choking.

Item number two is to leave baby UNBUCKLED while feeding.  This probably seems a bit counter-intuitive, especially since highchairs these days come with enough snaps and harnesses to rival a carseat, but the reality is that if baby does happen to start choking, you can’t help without removing her from the chair.  The harder it is to get her out of the chair, the longer it will take to help her.  Here is where we loop back to the previous paragraph and remind you not to turn your back while baby is eating, lest she somersault over the tray.

The final item on the list is to master ye old finger swipe and it is a bit more BLW specific.  If a bad gagging fit does hit, or even if you foresee trouble clearing an item from the mouth, the easiest way to help is to reach into the mouth and clear it with your finger.  Don’t be alarmed if this actually triggers gagging – you would too if someone reached into your mouth.  Also don’t freak out if all of this gagging triggers puking.  That’s the body’s way of making sure stuck objects get pushed up and out.
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So there you have it.  Baby-led weaning in a nutshell.  What tricks did you use to make it even easier?

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Dropping the F-bomb

BLW Part I: The Whys

BLW Part III: The Cuteness

 

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Babyled solids part one: the whys

There are so many reasons I do Baby-led weaning.  If I had to boil it down I’d say it just feels right.  Remember my cave-woman test for babies?  This one scores an A+.  But in the interest of fleshing out a blog post, here are (in no particular order) my top 5 reasons for choosing BLW.

Fun for baby

Babies so dislike the airplane-spoon game that it’s become cliché.  What they do like and, unless you’ve had blinders on for the last 2 months of baby’s life you’ll be well aware of this, is to grab stuff and put it in their mouths.  I can’t even count how many hours have I spent lately trying to stop Lady Fair from eating my hair, jewelery, coffee mug and car keys.  Not to mention leaves whenever I reach into the garden while babywearing.  She keeps trying though – it really is her favourite thing to do – so why not let her do it with her food?

Healthy food

Do these ‘puffed snacks’ have too much salt?  Does the lid of the apple sauce jar have BPA in it?  Who knows?  And with BLW, who cares?  I’m so tired of worrying whether something is healthy or not, especially since the stuff that appears to be healthy is often not all it’s cracked up to be.  But with broccoli, there isn’t really that much to wonder about.

Healthy food relationships

I am a woman who was born and raised in North America.  In other words, my relationship with food is seriously messed up.  I’m also slightly overweight, due, in large part, to those messed up food attitudes.  If I’m unable to listen to my own body speaking to me, why on earth would I think I could hear someone else’s from across the table?  Bottom line, the less I control how (and how much) my kids eat, the better for them.

True story: when Little Man was about seven months old he went on a very uncharacteristic food jag.  All of a sudden he was a meataholic.  His veggies, even his beloved brussels sprouts (not kidding, that was his FAVOURITE food as a baby) went straight to the ground for a solid week.  Just when I was starting to thoroughly panic about it, I got my first post-partum period and man, was it a doozie.  Clearly I had been serving up some very low-iron boob juice and his little body knew that.  Had I been spooning food into his mouth as per my own judgement, I would have been putting in things his body didn’t need.

Laziness

Einstein famously bought 7 copies of the same suit so he wouldn’t need to waste mental energy choosing his clothes every day.  BLW allows for the same mental efficiency: “should we eat this vegetable today, or that vegetable?”  Pretty easy decision.

Menu planning aside, the prep is also incredibly easy.  No strainers, food mills or special little ice cube trays needed.  Step one, make yourself a meal.  Step two, put some of it on baby’s plate.  Ta-da!!  Going to be away from home? No problem.  Pack an avocado and a knife.  Alternatively, you can probably find something in your restaurant meal that’s baby-appropriate.

I’ve watched in awe as parents I know order a coffee they don’t want just so they can ask the Tim Horton’s cashier to microwave their pureed turkey-sicle, for which they needed to lug around a cooler.  Ya, I’m so not that energetic.

Safety – the Biggie

The thing with pureeing food is that it’s like putting a life-jacket on during your swimming lesson.  No one drowns during a structured, supervised swimming lesson.  They drown when no one is looking, especially if they weren’t allowed to properly learn to swim.  Kids are at risk for choking, there’s no doubt about that.  Part of the risk comes from having small throats that food can get stuck in easily, but the other part is from not having the skill to coordinate jaw, lip and tongue movements to control where food goes.  Just like you can’t learn a proper breast stroke with a lifejacket, you also can’t learn to move food around your mouth if your food is always inserted to the back of your moth where you have no choice but to swallow.  Letting kids eat pieces of (appropriately soft) food helps them master the skills of not choking so when they get hold of a pebble or piece of lego when it isn’t meal time, they’ll be safer.
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Stay tuned for Part II where I get into some of the practical how-to’s of BLW!

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Dropping the F-bomb

BLW Part II: The Hows

BLW Part III: The Cuteness

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Why I breastfeed; then and now

There was never really a question in my mind as to what to feed my baby.  I’m a biologist, so it seemed a given to me to feed him in the biologically appropriate way.  I remember at one point early in my pregnancy realizing that I hadn’t actually discussed the topic with my husband, so I tried to casually run it by him.

“You know the baby’s going to be breastfed, right?” I asked.  He looked at me like I had two heads and for a split second I had the terrible thought that I’d have to start my breastfeeding relationship by convincing my husband.  But I’d forgotten he’s the son of a veterinarian, very well versed in how mammals operate and what he said a moment later was,

“Well how else would we feed it?”

The reasons for breastfeeding at the beginning were simple enough, but now that we’re in our second year, I find the reasons changing and I know they’ll continue to change the longer we nurse.

Breastfeeding in the Rockies

Year One – For Us

Like I said, in the beginning it was pretty straightforward.  This is the healthiest way to feed a baby.  This is the way human babies are designed to eat.

When I add into that the fact that breastfeeding (once you get the hang of it) is much easier than bottle feeding – no bottles to sterilize, no water to boil, no babies screaming while you wait for milk to warm up – I was sold.  Good for him, easy for me.  What more could a mom want?

Year Two – For Society

Now that he’s past his first birthday and eating lots of solid foods and nursing slightly less, I feel the reasons I continue changing.  Sure, breastmilk is still a wonderfully healthy food for him, but it’s no longer the only healthy food he’s capable of eating.  The health benefits, while still present, are much more subtle now.  But since he’s past his first birthday, I seem to have crossed some sort of societal cut-off line.  The good-for-yous that I used to get when people saw me nursing are quickly being outnumbered by gasps of he’s-still-nursing?  My grandmother actually leaned over him the other day while he was nursing, poking him and telling him to cut it out because he’s too big for that.

I made a decision last year after a particularly nasty reaction to my breastfeeding, that I would no longer cover or hide while doing it.  I realized that what had been said to me was unsettling enough that it might have harmed my breastfeeding relationship had I been less secure in it.  I also realized that since I have an incredible support network that many other mothers don’t, I can take that sort of abuse without being too badly shaken.  So I decided that I might as well suck up as much of that negativity as I can, in the hopes it saves a mom who is on less sure footing with breastfeeding.

It’s not that I want to offend or scandalize anyone.  It’s just that if someone sees me breastfeeding my walking, steak-eating toddler in public and they are offended or scandalized by it… well, then they won’t think it’s such a big deal the next time they see a mom nursing her newborn, will they?  They might just start to think it’s normal.

So this year, I must say, I do it as much for the sake of society as I do for the sake of my Little Man.

Year Three (and more) – For the Future

And what will next year bring?  More activism?  Maybe.  But it will definitely start to bring something else: a Little Man who isn’t quite so little anymore.  A Little Man, actually, who might just be old enough to hold onto some memories.  The longer I nurse him, and the longer I nurse any babies that might be in my future, the more likely it is that he’ll remember it.  It will become a part of our family narrative that he’ll take with him through life.  It will be totally and utterly normal to him when it’s time to have his own family and start his own family narrative.

The longer I nurse him, the more likely it will be that when his future wife looks at him and tentatively says she wants to breastfeed their baby, his response will be “Well, what else would we feed it?”

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Picking my battles… TV isn’t one of them

Hi, I’m Krista and I’m a TV addict.  So is my son.

When I was planning the kind of parent I wanted to be, the images in my head were of a home with a TV that collected dust.  But 13 months in, that is definitely not the reality and I’ve decided to accept that it never will be.

I loooove TV.  Movies too.  I always have.  For many years, before streaming and ‘on demand’ programming, my weeknight activities were scheduled around my shows.  Even as a kid I would throw a fit if my parents made me go out during Star Trek (yup, big Trekker nerd here!)  My mom actually let me quit ballet because I complained that my class was at the same time as the Wonder Years.  In short, it interfered with my life.  So I was determined to get rid of it completely so that my kids don’t suffer the same fate.  But that’s just not going to happen.

My son enjoys the TV.  From day one I’ve had it on, usually turned to the news, because the voices make me feel less lonely in my house all by myself.  In the last three months it’s been increasingly tuned to Treehouse to entertain Little Man.  And I’ve been beating myself up about it because he’s so little, he shouldn’t be watching it AT ALL.  But when music comes on and his face lights up and he gets up and starts dancing and laughing, how can I say no?  And when it’s five o’clock and I’m itching for some down time but dinner still needs to be cooked and Little Man is literally biting my legs to get my attention, why shouldn’t I give myself that break?

And then there’s the fact that I had many goals like this when I was pregnant and let’s face it, I can only tackle so many things at once.  I’m very proud of the strides I’ve made to feed his body (and mine) with clean, delicious, whole foods.  It takes a lot of time and energy, and it’s a major life change for me.  But this is a crucial period for him nutrition-wise, so right now it’s my priority for him.  I do know that this is also a crucial time for his brain development, but the reality is that I’ll be able to continue nurturing his intellect long after I’ve lost the ability to control his food.

So here’s the new plan.  It’s no longer about unattainable goals for quantity.  It’s about quality, connection, and balance.

I want him to know that TV can be a way to get information, not just a way to tune out.  So I’ll be making sure we watch shows in French.  My french is good but if I want a bilingual baby, he needs to hear native speakers.  And I’ll be making sure we mix some documentaries and National Geographic stuff in with the cartoons.

I don’t want the TV to isolate us.  When I was growing up, we had 3 TVs for 4 people.  My parents could usually agree on programming (except during hockey playoffs) and shared the biggest one.  My sister then took the second TV and I sat in the kitchen to get my Star Trek fix.  That won’t happen in my house.  We’ll continue to have one TV.  So movie night will be an exercise in compromise as well as learning to enjoy the things the other members of the family enjoy.

I want him to see us walking away from the TV.  Weekends are for outings.  Nice weather is for playing in the garden.  Responsibilities get tended to before the TV comes on.  I just can’t completely eschew the TV, but if I’m modeling that balance for him – the balance I couldn’t find as a kid – then I’ll feel like I’ve accomplished something.

What about you – what battles have you had to concede?  What plans of attack have had to be altered when you realized they weren’t working or feasible?

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Why is it so hard to trust your gut?

Moms know their babies better than anyone else.  If mom feels like everything is right, then it probably is.  And vice versa.  So why is it so hard to trust our Momtuition?

95% confident in me… 95% of the time anyway

Up until now I’ve actually been really proud of my confidence in myself and my knowledge of my baby.  For a first time mom, I think I’m pretty cool and collected.  Friends and acquaintances have actually told me they’re impressed with how confident I am, given my neophyte status.  My mantra generally is that babies aren’t that breakable, emergencies aren’t that common.

And my confidence started early too.  When my OBs were trying to convince me that I was on borrowed time with my pregnancy, I knew better.  I felt the healthiest I’d ever been and at 41 weeks I pushed out my 8lb 9oz, perfect baby to prove it.  When the public health nurses were trying to tell me I was starving my baby and I needed to put him on formula, I knew better.  (Ok, I was hormonal, so I had a few moments of doubt.  I drove to the store, bought the formula, then came to my senses and threw it in the garbage.)  My milk came in that day so fast the baby was gagging on it and I told the nurses we didn’t care to see them anymore.  Then, when he was 8 months old and suddenly had a fever out of the blue, I didn’t worry too much.  I sat down on the couch and nursed him for two days straight until the rash showed up.  Then I called Telehealth and told the nurse I just wanted to confirm it was Roseola.  Indeed it was, and my Momtuition was right – again.

So why am I doubting myself now?

The other thing I’ve been confident about up until now is his ability to know innately what his body needs.  My philosophy about feeding is that as long as each of the options on the plate is healthy, then it doesn’t matter if he has 3 helpings of one and none of the other.  His instincts will guide him.  And I’ve already seen proof that this wisdom works.  One of his favourite foods has always been brussels sprouts (believe it or not).  But when he was about 8 months old, he started throwing them – and every other vegetable – on the floor.  The meat, eggs and avocados were the only foods that made it past the gates, meal after meal.  The environmentalist in me was cringing at how much meat he was eating.  But guess what?  I was mysteriously craving it too and 3 days later, lo and behold, my first postpartum period arrived.  What a smart Little Man to know he we needed extra iron!  That Momtuition about trusting him was bang on – yet again.

So why am I worried about his food preferences now?

Little Man started walking about 2 months ago and at the exact same time his molars started to come in.  He’s eating less, nursing more and moving all day long.  It’s a recipe for weight loss. He’s still growing and learning new things every day.  He’s still making ample diapers.  He’s happy all day and sleeping enough but not too much.  Every indicator outside of the 10.4% weight loss says he’s fine.  When the nurses overlooked all of those same markers last year and told me that his 10.3% weight loss trumped them all, I was livid.  How asinine!

So why am I so worried that he’s lost weight now?

I think part of my problem is that I don’t have the resources I did before.  When we lived in Calgary I had umpteen friends with babies who were going through the same things or who had already been there and done that.  I would hear about their worries, challenges and solutions before I encountered them myself so I had lots of time to mentally prepare my plan of attack.  And I knew constantly that my baby was totally normal.  Here in Toronto, I’m alone in Mommyhood.  The women in my family either didn’t breastfeed, or were done before their babies were a year old, so I can’t ask them either because formula-fed babies grow differently.

I think the other part of my problem is that food and weight are my biggest personal hang-ups.  I make sure to be hands-off with his eating so that I don’t project my screwed up attitude onto him, but it’s so hard.  So even though eating less and losing weight is actually the opposite of my problem, watching him pick the sweet fruit but not the nutrient-denser kale gives me visions of a lifetime of food manipulation.

I don’t have any answers to sum this post up with.  Just one final question: if anyone knows the whereabouts of the magic Mommy Confidence Wand, could you fill me in??

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Wild for wild food

Now that I not only have my own home to garden in, but we’ve also moved back to within driving distance of my family’s ‘cottage’, I’m full steam ahead on the wild food train!  Wooowooooo

I’ve always eaten a variety of wild foods from the aforementioned cottage.  Although, I should explain that the term cottage is used loosely.  What it is, in fact, is a 44-acre former gravel pit.  Heavily forested, but also containing 3 lakes covering about 10 of the 44 acres, and 3 powerless, waterless cabins.  In other words, heaven on earth.

The lakes have bass that are abundant and tasty.  The open gravel areas are usually a carpet of oregano and thyme with wild onions every now and then.  The roadsides are covered with raspberries, blackberries and wild grapes.  Go in a bit and you’ll usually find a highbush cranberry or two, some gooseberries and ramps.  By far the most coveted finds as a child were the spring fiddleheads and the fall puffball mushrooms.

This weekend, I went to a whole new level of wild with my food.  I ate a goose egg!  I wish I had taken my own picture, but the acquisition was sort of a surprise so you’ll have to look at this Googled picture.  One of the lakes I was mentioning has an island in the middle that’s been prime goose-nesting grounds for 30 years.  This year my Uncle ventured a peek inside the nest.

In case you’re curious, mama geese will continue to lay eggs until they get a brood of hatchlings, because nest predators are not uncommon.  So I haven’t ruined this whole generation!  But, it’s also important to keep in mind that the later the goslings hatch, the less time they have to mature before winter so there’s a limit to be respected.

I fried my egg overhard (I prefer my yolks yolky, but since I’ve never eaten a wild goose egg before and I’m nursing, I decided to err on the side of caution) and I have to say it was still very yummy.  Pretty much like a good farmer’s market chicken egg, only biiigger.  About 2-3 times the size.  The shell is a lot thicker too.  And others have said they found the yolk denser, but like I said, compared to a good pastured chicken egg, it’s pretty similar.

Nutritionally though, they’re apparently quite a bit denser.  Weight for weight, the goose egg has more selenium, potassium, calcium and magnesium.  It has twice the iron, twice the thiamin and FOUR times as much B12 and SEVEN times the Omega 3.  It’s ratio of Omega 3 to Omega 6 is about 1:1 whereas the chicken egg is about 1:15.*  Basically a multivitamin in a shell.

All in all, I’d say it was a very good long weekend.  And I even brought some ferns home so I can have fiddleheads in my backyard next year.

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*I do wonder if this data would differ for pastured eggs, from chickens allowed to forage for a biologically appropriate diet, but I couldn’t find any good info on that.

http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/dairy-and-egg-products/127/2

http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/dairy-and-egg-products/111/2

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Dealing with ‘those’ days

This post is a fleshier version of a comment I left for Kelly at Becoming Crunchy.  Kelly wrote about having one of those days.  You know  them.  The ones when the world seems like a giant hill and you’re constantly at the bottom of it.  The days that make you throw your hands up and give in and then you feel like a complete failure for giving in.  Yup, you know them.

I’ve been trying to figure out some strategies for myself for those kinds of days and here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

I try to keep a *better* comfort food option in the house.  Like Kelly, I love the frozen pizzas and they’re usually my go-to wit’s end food.  But I also love spaghetti.  If it’s made with white flour all the better!  So I keep one pack and a can of sauce (I usually make sauce from scratch) in the cupboard.  It’s still not a wonderful meal, but it’s an improvement over Delissio so I don’t end up beating myself up as much.  When we finally get a deep freeze, I also plan on cooking a large batch of comfort food (including pizza!) to keep in said freezer for just these occasions.

The other thing I’ve been trying to do is keep ‘props’ lists.  Stuff that I’m proud of myself for.  Specifically I call them my “Done Lists” where I jot down everything I do in a day (right down to getting showered.)  I’ve reached a year of being at home and I’m not sure of my work future so I’ve been feeling, well, useless.  The routine of housework feels never-ending (probably because it is), so I feel like I’m never accomplishing anything.  So I find it helps to have a record of how full my day is, to remind me that I’m not useless.

And the last is that I try to remind myself my diet (and workout routine) is a chequing account, not a savings account.  It’s normal to make withdrawals, so there’s no point trying to avoid them.  The important thing is that the deposits outweigh them.

I would love to hear other strategies for coping with that feeling of defeat that we all get.

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Real, live, real food

Disclaimer: If you’re a food-lover and prone to foodgasms like I am, the content of this post may be considered pornographic… although my photography isn’t wonderful enough to do the food justice.

This post could also have been titled “How to make a complicated recipe even more complicated” because that’s precisely what I did.  The recipe is Italian Bread and Cabbage Soup from Jamie Oliver At Home.  One of the best cookbooks in the history of cookbooks, in my opinion.  And this is one of the most delicious things I’ve ever eaten.  But Jamie’s recipes aren’t exactly quick – at least not the ones in this book – so it’s a good thing it also feeds us for three solid days.

What’s so complicated about this particular dish is the number of times you have to cook and then set aside, which happens to be my cooking pet peeve because it uses so many extra dishes.  But anyway, away I went, boiling the entire head of cabbage and the bunch of kale and setting them aside.  Frying bacon, mixing in boiled cabbage and setting it all aside.  Rubbing garlic onto a bazillion slices of toasted bread… and setting them aside.

The giant bowl of greens (boiled then set aside) next to the delicious bread (garlic-rubbed then set aside).

But you might know by now I’m a bit picky about my food being real.  I’m positively anal about Little Man’s food being real.  One thing I’m really not ready for to him eat yet is factory bread.  The ingredient list on most bread packages makes me feel sick, so he only eats bread if I make it at home.  Thus, I spent the morning making lovely whole wheat italian bread that I would sacrifice to the soup.  That’s it on the baking stone.

I also don’t love commercial soup bases.  If you get the liquid versions, they’re disgustingly salty.  The bouillon cubes are not only disgustingly salty, but also full of hydrogenated oils and food dyes.  So I make my own.  In this case, 3 quarts of it. I keep a ‘stock box’ in my freezer to collect stems from greens, carrot tops, asparagus bottoms, meat bones…  Every week or so it gets full enough to make a little pot of stock that I stick back in the freezer for days like yesterday.  No salt, no food dye.

So once I brewed up some stock, baked some bread, par-cooked everything else and set it aside, I assembled the whole thing in layers like a trifle.  Whew!  Like I said, luckily it’s a huge dish (as evidenced by the barely noticeable dent made in it by filling my bowl) and a delicious one (just ask Little Man, who scarfed it down)!  Yay for cooking from scratch

Glass of wine with that bowl of deliciousness? Don't mind if I do...

Don't you take my cabbage!

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Things that make you go… huh? – March 11

I frequently have tidbits I feel like sharing.  They’re often off-topic to this blog, sometimes I’ve Tweeted them through the week, sometimes they’re too long for Twitter (but not long enough for their own blog post) and sometimes it’s just a recounting of the adorableness of Little Man.  Either way, I collect them all here and send them out for some Friday fun.

Went to IKEA last week and watched a woman spoon feed a whole lot of IKEA “ice cream” to a baby who was at most the same age as Little Man (i.e. 9 mos).  WTF?

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Is it just me, or is Charlie Sheen wearing a rug??

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Mike Huckabee thinks Natalie Portman is glamorizing single motherhood, eh?  Bristol Palin, on the other hand, is a hero for not having an abortion, I suppose?

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Is there anything cuter than baby bed hair?  I think not.

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There’s another mad cow case in Alberta. Seriously, can we stop grinding up dead herbivores and feeding them to the not-yet-dead herbivores?  Is that really too much to ask?

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From the Twittersphere:   “The person was giving me stink eye {for BFing in public}, while she poured ice coffee in her infants bottle.” via @mama2_3penguins

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