Where we are at

by Anna

1 year review

It was time for the one year review and I am happy to say that the Monkey passed with flying colours. Here are the measurments:

Head circumference 49cm = 96th centile (wow big head!)
Height 79cm (although he did wriggle a lot, so this might not be 100% accurate) = 89th centile
Weight 10.46kg = 75th centile

Amongst other things – development and milestones

Since we are slowly expanding the blog and won't be writing just about food any more, but also parenting topics, developmental milestones and the likes, I thought I share with you a little bit more where we are at...

Milestones are a hot topic with new parents, and there can be a lot of boasting how amazing one's child is. Some are already walking at nine months (admittedly I have seen one such child), others are (according to their parents) already using enough words to explain quantum physics. 

We all know that every child learns in its own pace. And the child that is walking early may not be too bothered about other things, and vice versa. Our monkey is definitely not a child prodigy, nor particularly fast with any of the developmental milestones. Does it bother us? No. We think he is doing just fine.

At 12 months and 2 weeks our almost-toddler's development

What he is doing (amongst others)

• stacking Ikea wooden stacking rings (started this two weeks ago)

• putting lids on things, including lipstick caps (started this at roughly 11.5 months?)

• cruising like no man's business (been doing this for a fair while, without bothering to progress to walking)

• crawls like attempting to break a world record for speediness (he dragged himself for a long long time before starting to properly crawl at 10.5 months or thereabouts)

• feeding himself more or less successfully (by which I mean, only half goes on the floor)

What he doesn't yet do (yet)

• say individual words (in fact he has regressed from mama to daaaaaaaa for everything - but since he has three languages in his environment this is probably not surprising)

• walk (although he has just three days ago attempted his first step, purely by accident, and he does enjoy pushing the high chair through our living room)

• stand freely by himself

• quite understand the very cool Bobby Car he got from his grandparents for his birthday

He loves:

• music and jumping up and down in our arms "dancing"

• "stroking" the cat

• splashing with water no matter how big or small the container

• tactility games and songs like: Wind the bobbin up, Row Row Row the boat

• playing peek a boo – it is still the most entertaining game at this point

• pointing my finger to illustrations in books for me to name them


So you see... Every child is so different. I think what is most important is to enjoy the journey. This first year has already fled by.  I am happy we are not wishing it away by wanting our Monkey to do things he isn't ready for.

Clever Baby

by Anna

Now that I titled this post "Clever Baby" I realised we didn't really have an awful lot of foresight calling this blog the Veggie baby, baby blog given that we are almost approaching toddler age... Oh well. To us he will always be our baby. And the blog is our little project, so perhaps also our baby.

Anyhow, back to clever baby business.

No need to point out that babies' brains grow at a silly rate, particularly these first few years. So how can we make sure our veggie almost-toddler gets what he needs? Omega is a substantial support for growing brain cells. Read more about it here. And who doesn't want to have a clever baby? Luckily nowadays there is a whole wide range of vegetarian products out there which we can fall back on if our foods don't have quite enough of what we need.

Vegetarian DHA oil

We started using Nordic Naturals Baby DHA oil. It's easy to administer, simply by dropping it onto a spoonful of food, or emptying the dropper onto the prepared food and mix it under. Be sure to not have the food too hot before mixing the oil in, you don't want to kill the supplement (nor the vitamins in the actual prepared food).

Luckily our Monkey is fascinated by the dropper. He seems to almost enjoy his food more when we put a few drops onto the spoon, feed him (or let him feed himself) and repeat the process until we have given him the two recommended droppers.

Admittedly we often forget. It's definitely not a daily supplement in our house. However, we feel that he gets a fair amount of DHA with linseed. Giving him the oil only every other day seems to work fine for us.

Dropper in, dropper out, dropper in, dropper out....

And given that the Monkey has beenworking out how to put the dropper back into the little bottle and how to put lids on top of little cups for a while now, we think the DHA oil is indeed a clever little addition to his food.

Playing with lids, spoons and anything else within reach