Food and Love

 Weaning a baby is an experience fraught with anxiety at the best of times. In the comfort of your own kitchen, within the rhythms of your day, it can be a wonderful, rewarding, frustrating experience as your tiny child opens his beak for more banana or mango or experiences dislike for the first time with carrot or peas, his face wrinkling with displeasure. It can be quite frightening, giving your baby something that for the first time in his short life he seems to dislike (and the temptation is to immediately write it off and never give it again, but PERSIST! NOW is your window of opportunity to give them as many tastes as you can; they will never again be as receptive to every flavour.) But it's also a very instinctive experience: you taste the food with your baby, put the spoon in your mouth, make big "yummy" sounds and ensure it is as interactive and enjoyable as it can be for both of you. The act of feeding is the act of love, an act of sustaining inextricably linked to maternal and biological instinct.
 

Weaning Sam is an entirely different practical proposition. Admittedly he is an early eater, a hungry baby who is on a diet imposed by the dietician, his milk adjusted for volume and not calories because his the line on his weight chart is virtually vertical. At home I would lovingly concoct fruit and vegetable purees, particularly green ones, because of that 4-7 month flavour window, steam carrot and courgette batons, give him crunchy cold carrot or cucumber sticks for his sore gums. Here in hospital there is no home-cooked food. I am entirely reliant on the best ready-made pouches I can get in Boots. Once opened, they can't be re-used, even if he has just a tiny teaspoonful. I squeeze it into tiny sterilised pots and then try to teach my child the foreign act of eating something other than milk without being allowed to show him myself. I cannot put the spoon in my mouth, I cannot eat alongside him, I can't put my fingers in the puree and show him how to transfer food. He can't watch his family eating and demand a crust of bread to chew on. I can't have raw food in the room, I can't give him cold teething rings to chew on (not that he's over keen on anything other than his fingers, to be honest).  I'm going on blind instinct rather than natural cues that would normally indicate he's ready to eat. It's clinical, stripped of instinct and warmth.

 

However, his hunger is great enough that he just gets on with it. By day two, he was eating the entire 70g pouch. I'm going to have to search harder for the green veg purees, but he loves all the fruit and parsnip, we'll revisit sweet potato, carrot and peas. I passionately believe that children need to learn beyond sweetness, the "honeyed tones" of the orange vegetables and fruit, that there's a whole palate of flavours out there to be enjoyed, even the faintly bitter and sour. Because he doesn't need chemo, hopefully the weaning process won't be too interrupted and we can progress to some baby porridge in the mornings.

 

Because it's all about progress. And control. This I can control - up to a point. And I'm determined to give both my children the best introduction to the exciting world of food out there, which means that in hospital, in this environment completely not of my making, I have to work harder to make this process enjoyable and fun and natural so that in the outside world we can continue.

 

Oscar undergoes the same fanatical attention. With his "harvest" coming closer, I feel he needs feeding up, making strong enough to cope with loss of life-giving, life-healing marrow. Luckily he's in one of his phases of willingness; so we go to Nudo and eat sushi because he's so pleased with himself eating seaweed and salmon. We explore the Chinese supermarket for lychees and dragon fruit and Chinese gooseberries. We practise "Tiny Tastes", a reward game to encourage him to like broccoli, avocado, peppers. Diet is something I can DO, I can control, I can keep us healthy and out of hospital by ensuring we all eat a rainbow. Maybe Sam was so busy inside the womb exploring spices and sourness and all the different flavours I could throw at him, he just didn't have the time to make sure his immune system was working. But food is medicine too, a medicine infused with love and family and wellbeing that I can administer like the doctors with their antibiotics, keeping illness at bay in the only way I can.