Elia’s Age: 6 months

Ahem…by food, I mean solids (not that nursing isn’t food). I’m tell you, giving kids food for the first time creates some of the best faces, reactions, and sounds (and thankfully those experiences don’t stop with the very first food, but the first time that they eat many different things over the first few years).

It really is amazing how much things have changed in the four years between Ezra and Elia (of course we didn’t get to experience this with Liam)…for example, they are now suggesting that we no longer hold back on introducing food types or groups to kids – feed them anything, and do it early, as this is proving to help decrease food allergies. Ok, I can support it, but in moving from the theoretical to the logistical, we are finding some decent difficulty just trying new things before she gets ‘too old.’ Following the simple advise of introducing new things one at a time, and focusing on those things for a few days to determine how her body will react to the new food, it becomes quite the chore to introduce new food groups long before we would have done it previously. You almost need a organizational/planning chart if you want to aggressively introduce. Anyhow, as you can see below, her first reaction to rice cereal was about par for the course.

Age: 6 months (as these rewind posts are created, age seems like an important thing to include in Elia’s case)

Given how much we like swimming, it’s somewhat surprising that it took us an entire six months before we found our way to the pool with Elia. But, it seemed to work out alright since after the initial environmental shock, she settled right in and enjoyed the experience. Ezra showed her the surroundings of the kid’s pool, and I took her to the deeper end for some underwater time. I’m always amazed at how instinctual it is for kids to hold their breath when underwater…I guess that I just presumed that it was a taught skill prior to having children. Going to the pool with Ezra and Elia is a different experience than with just one of them, but Ezra has come a long way in swim lessons, and he has afforded us the ability to just let him play on his own without constant supervision..which is both freeing and troubling at the same time.