A Portrait a Week: 12/52

We had a BIG exciting weekend! Firstly Isabella's Ouma Sarie and Opa Jürgen came to visit from Germany. She gave Ouma a little bit of a lip when she saw her the first time Saturday morning when waking up but after that she's been a very smiley little granddaughter and loved spending time with them and having lots of cuddles.

Second big event was that Isabella started eating solids yesterday! Well, semi-solids really. We've started with baby rice cereal and will try fruit and veg purees next and (maybe) wait until 6 months to try some  real solid food which she can try and nibble on herself. I did not expect her to keep much in her mouth for the first few tries, but she was very interested in what was happening and seemed to keep wanting another taste of what's on the spoon. She had a go with the spoon herself too and is able to easily get it to her mouth so I'm sure she'll enjoy feeding herself some finger foods later. Second meal this evening and she did even better. Yesterday each spoonful was accompanied with her pushing her tongue out and I expected it to take her a while to stop doing that, but today she had several spoonfuls without pushing it out with her tongue and kept eagerly opening her mouth towards the spoon. Yay! Sooo exciting to let her try new things and so glad we started earlier than the advised 6 months by the health visitors at the clinic over here. She slept really well last night too. Don't know whether it was the cereal or just a lucky night! Elizabeth, if you're reading, thank you so much for ALL the advice- in general and especially recently regarding solids :-) We really appreciate all your help and support over email! 

The health visitors here are so very against babies starting solids before 6 months and they won't even find out the individual baby's circumstances and how she's doing but will just keep telling us to wait so it's been hard at first to go against their advice as we'd like to think they know what they're doing, but I'm glad we took the leap into starting a little earlier.

And then number three: Isabella is 5 months old today! Which also means I'm half way through maternity leave :-( I can't imagine leaving her for a whole day... I'm enjoying her so much. As much as I don't want her to get any older and stay a cuddly sweet baby forever, she is just so much fun the older she gets. Learning and exploring so much now. She's exploring making new sounds now too, making repetitive sounds starting with na-na-na and this week now also started saying da-da-da.

So anyway, here is this week's photo taken yesterday while she was having her very first meal of baby  cereal.

What do you mean that's it for today?