First taste of cereal!

I have been eagerly awaiting the day when I will be able to feed Laetitia using methods other than breastfeeding since she started to refuse the bottle. Most of the books or information I read in the internet suggested a minimum of age 4 months old before introducing solids. Of course there were other things to take note of such as steady head control etcto be careful about. Well, I felt that Laetitia was more than ready and in fact, she seems very keen and interested whenever she sees me having my lunch (she is usually sleeping by the time we have our dinner).
Yesterday I decided to give her her very first spoon of cereal (Blédina's Ma 1ère Blédine goût nature) mixed with my expressed breastmilk.

I was very excited! She seems very happy and she's saying hi for the camera. :p

First mouth of cereal.

Not very impressed after all. I think it might be due to the fact that she was also POOING while I feed her!
I will persevere!

This early afternoon, I told myself I will have better luck at getting her to eat some of the cereal. I was going to feed her the cereal at the same time, the late afternoon feed. Keeping my fingers crossed and being optimistic, I started to get her ready. All settled in her swing, a bib to "catch" the mess that she might make and we're ready to roll.

Here's my bundle of joy looking all cheery as usual. That's a good start.

Here comes the yummy rice cereal..... WOO she is happy with it. Yippee. Big smiles for mummy.

I dare say that she seems to enjoy it.

It was not easy for her to learn to swallow after the cereal enters her mouth. It took a couple of spoons before she understood that she needed to swallow. I had to tilt the spoon high up (occasionally touching her nose with it) before she would do the swallowing action.

In the end, she managed to finished about 20ml of cereal. I made 35ml mixed with 3 tablespoonfuls of cereal to create a mixture of about 40ml. She had about half of it. I guess she could have finished everything but I read that it's best to introduce it slowly. After giving her the cereal, I continued to breastfeed her. I will do this incrementally over a week before finally replacing the 3pm feed (the feed before her last feed of the day) with cereal. After that, I will advance to replacing the second meal of the day with another type of solid food. Probably some vegetable/fruit puree.