Ikea highchair best for baby-led weaning

Or any weaning for that matter. It's so cheap ($50 AUD with tray) and it's just one bit of moulded plastic which makes it really easy to clean. I thought our Fisher Price Booster Seat was simple and easy until I tried one of these. Phoebe can sit up straight and get close to her food unlike other highchairs which often recline a bit too much. You can even put it under the shower to clean it which I did for the first time tonight. And it's the height of fashion. All the cafès have them (presumably because they're so easy to clean), as do most of my friends with babies and those who don't have one want one. Seriously why do people pay through the nose for a padded piece of faff when they could grab something like this? It's yet another example of manufacturers taking advantage of parents who simply want the best for their baby.

I love our IKEA highchair and so does Phoebe. I'm sure she thinks I take it everywhere with us as wherever we are there seems to be one for her to sit in. Now that's where the Fisher Price seat really does come into its own (that and having a tray you can move in towards her to help prevent bits of food ending up on her lap). I always have it in the car in case we go somewhere that doesn't have a high chair. And as Phoebe is one of those babies that generally insists on feeding herself (i.e. messy) we even use it in the park. It's the only way I can get her to sit still whilst eating.

Check out me in my new chair!

I love it this much!

I am an eating machine.
And in other news, Phoebe definitely has a third tooth now, one along from the front right on the top. And she's turned into an Eating Machine. Seriously, today I just could not get enough food into her and she had plenty of breastfeeds too. She woke at 2am, which I didn't think too unusual as she'd been asleep since 7.30pm. I gave her a feed, she went back to sleep. All very normal. An hour and a bit later she was awake again. This happened a few nights ago and Toby gave her some water and she went back to sleep (it's very hot at the moment). Not this time. She got quite annoyed. I'd had the impression that she would have had more milk at 2am had there been more so I went in and gave her another feed. She drained my breasts and still wasn't satisfied. I went back to bed and Toby climbed in the cot with her to try to settle her. This just served to make her more angry and she screamed.

Eventually I went in and sent Toby back to bed. I removed her sleeping bag (because it was hot), and took her into the kitchen for a snack (yummy corn and corgette muffins made and created by moi) and some water, changed her nappy, put her back in her cot, sang Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (when I'm done having kids I don't think I'll ever want to hear that bloody nursery rhyme again) and she went straight back to sleep. When she got up at 7am she wanted a breastfeed again then this afternoon she ditched her lunchtime nap in favour of a second lunch. And still had dinner!! And dinnertime slowly eased its way into bathtime as I offered her more and more food. And she ate it all. I've probably mentioned before that the principles of baby-led weaning are that you never force them to eat and you keep offering healthy food until they refuse it. Between 3pm and 6.30pm she had a decent helping of sausage and lentil casserole, cream cheese on toast, a couple of tablespoons of yoghurt, about half a small banana, an entire milk arrowroot biscuit, a bit of prune, some grapefruit, orange, apple and watermelon, a bit of rice cake, some rusk and a tiny amount of weetbix (weetabix for the poms). There may have been more but that's all my tired brain can remember. I blame the aliens.

She felt heavier today too (before she ate all that) and when I weighed her on our not-very-accurate scales she was 9.1kg; she's hovered around 8.6 and 8.7kg for a couple of months now. Good to see she is still hovering* around the 75th percentile.

(*Would've loved to find a better word than hovering... hate using the same word twice like that... but you know... I'm really too tired to care)

Anyway, I have to go. There's a cat on my back. No, really!