Raising a Human - Part 4

… continuation of the previous part

Eating solid food

Book 8: Baby-led weaning

Pushing mashed stuff to anyone always felt strange to me. Food should be fun and exiting.

If you feel the same (or even if you don't, but you want to give your kid a great experience), read this and then decide.

It's a bit more work at the beginning. As a reward, your kid will be able to eat independently very soon and mainly you will both enjoy mealtimes a lot.

I'm glad that I did this and I can recommend it to anyone. It's so much better than the “mushy stuff”!

Book 9: Getting the Little Blighters to Eat

If you at any point get worried that your kid doesn't eat this and that and it should eat it and you start to freak out and there may be some battles over the food and resistance and frustration... it's absolutely normal and it happens to everyone.

Mealtime really can be fun and nobody needs to cry or get upset. Read this to make your mealtimes happy time and your child adventurous eater again.

More good news: The book is very thin.

Last and extra batch of books

Book 10: My First Signs

You can find everywhere that kids talk about 1 year. Well, they talk, but nobody understands.

​You don't need this book to start a sign language. But I can definitely recommend teaching your kid a few signs. It saves you lot of nerves and lots of tears of your little one.

Before she could speak clearly, our daughter used signs for "milk", "eat" and "drink" since she was about 8 months. It was so much better than former screaming.

Book 11: How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen

Very nice book full of many advices. If I only could remember all of them.

It really works (most of the time). I only struggle to remember the right approach in a critical situation - I keep trying and I'm getting better. Worths reading I think.

Book 12: First Children’s Encyclopaedia

This one is not for you! We gave it to our daughter when she was about a year. She loved it. She could spend hours a day listing through it and discussing the pictures with us.​

Warning: buy also lots of tape to fix torn pages.

Book 13: How to Raise an Amazing Child the Montessori Way

Nice informative book about Montessori approach, contains tips for nice and simple activities.

It may be very interesting for your kid to "read" too - they love the pictures inside. Our daughter used to "read" it at least once a day.