Frais & doux

We celebrated Lauris’s six month birthday our first week here in France. The celebration entailed a bottle of wine with dinner (for the parents) and not much else due to all the things happening that week. Being the milestone to start solid food, we might have started a little slowly; a few days later he tasted his first French bread, a few days after that some rice. We continued with the fruit, bananas, apples and pears, and for a few months combinations of the above were the bulk of his “real food” diet. Sure, there were the occasional carrots and peas, but his reaction wasn’t the most favorable and so we stuck mostly to the sweet stuff.

Upon his eight month birthday we started to approach the whole thing a little more seriously, Lauris was eating solids three times a day. The oatmeal and rice were accompanied by some sweet fruit in order to pass the “taste test.” Not-so-sweet veggies made recurring appearances until he finally would accept a few spoons at time. The big addition this month was dairy – he seemed to accept yogurt similarly to oatmeal, as long as there was some fruit to sweeten the deal, it was ok. By now I was buying apples and pears in larger quantities, processing them and freezing little ice cube size portions to eat the following week. As we are still waiting on our vast library of baby books to arrive, we consulted the internet, my parents and friends to find more safe foods to try. Among the suggestions were pureed meats, cottage cheese, sweet potatoes, eggs, well cooked pasta, beans and many more food items I now remembered my younger brother and sister eating (and smearing, throwing, burping up…) when they were Lauris’s age.

A few weeks ago in the store we were scouring the aisles for some of these new options when we discovered that not all of these things are available here; although sweet potatoes are occasionally available in specialty stores, we couldn’t find any, nor could we find semolina pudding (manna putra is how I’ve always known it, I’m not sure of the translation). We decided to try several different yogurts and cottage cheese brands, as well as a few more teething cracker-type biscuits.

As I mentioned, the yogurt made the cut, and then a few days ago we decided to try the cottage cheese. Lauris wasn’t a fan… fruit or no fruit, it didn’t matter, and the opened package went back in the fridge. Yesterday I pulled it out and asked Roberts if it was still good, I thought we would try again and being that I am not a fan of cottage cheese, I wasn’t about to try a taste. Well, Roberts checked it, and discovered that we had fed our son sour cream with his applesauce.

Which brings me to the point of this entry; it is hard enough shopping for a nine month old when it is your first child, but even harder when everything is in French! However, we will continue our new food adventures (sans frais & doux) and our search for Cheerios and sweet potatoes, because Lauris likes to eat!