Every night before bed, we follow a similar routine with Georgia.

If hubby is home, he starts it off with a bath - otherwise, it's all me. After the bath, we have a massage on the change table, get her dressed, and read her a book. Then we nurse & follow up with a top up bottle of expressed milk.

And before I put her into bed, while rocking her to get her drowsy, I tell her a few things - I love you, time for bed, night night - and this:

It's been insanely hot already this year, and Spring has barely just begun. I'm not looking forward to the warm days that are ahead of us, or the bushfire threats that they bring along with them, but they do bring back memories.

A year has gone since that day. I stayed pregnant, I gave birth, I brought our daughter (!) home. I've watched her growing, a little bit here & a lot there. I've celebrated her life with our family, drifted from old friends and made new ones. I've learned to put somebody else's needs before my own without even a second thought. It all sounds so cliche, but I honestly can't remember life without her. Gone are the days of jumping in the car & heading out without a thought - now it's all about the nappy bag, the food packed, the spare outfits ready to go. And you know what? I wouldn't go back for all of the carefree times in the world.

That little jellybean baby has become a pretty awesome person. I love all of her quirks - the way she reaches for our faces, the way she makes her bottom lip quiver right before she cries, the way she lights up when she sees her dad across the room. I know how to make her giggle, how to make her squeal, and how to calm her down. She is so curious, so impatient, so feisty. I watch her & get glimpses of what she'll be like next year, and a year after that.

The last time I showed you a week by week post, I stopped at Week 15 - but the weeks have flown by since then. This post shows off my gorgeous girl from Week 16-27. Here's the first few weeks for comparison:

Other than that, things have been fairly quiet around here. Lots of time spent with hubby while he's been working from home - watching Georgia fall in love with her daddy is just gorgeous. I don't want to jinx things, but she's been so good with other people lately, lots of smiles and cheerful chats. I hope that continues.

Our nights have been getting better, and we're plugging away at the day sleeps. She is well and truly into size 00 and the hot weather has let me experiment with short sleeved/legged rompers and suits - loving being able to get those thighs into the sunlight. This age is fantastic. And I'm sure it's only going to get better!

A very happy half-birthday to my beautiful daughter, who is growing more beautiful & clever every day.

We have a new 'thing' around these parts - wobbly sitting!

She doesn't last long before becoming the Leaning Tower of Georgia, but she's improving. It's so flipping cute!

I love watching her learn new things. She's interacting with other people (& other babies) loads now, and is so much fun. This age, nearly six months, is great - but people keep telling me it gets better and better.

Now seriously... go back and look at those chubby knee rolls again, you know you want to. Love!

First up, hi lovely ICLW-ers! Thanks for stopping by - it's always nice having my inbox flare up with comments from new faces. This little blog was started a few years ago, originally about life in Australia as a primary school teacher. It evolved as I did, following my journey into living in England, travelling the world, living with PCOS and planning our wedding. When we started our TTC journey, we knew it'd be a challenge {see the aforementioned PCOS diagnosis!} but we didn't realise just HOW hard it would be. Here on the blog, I talked about our infertility adventure, which moved into IVF and our eventual BFP. Life has been crazy, and we are so, so lucky to have welcomed our baby daughter, G, into the world in March this year.

G is 25 weeks old now, and an absolute delight. We're having some difficulties with sleeping at the moment, but that is a topic for a whole new post. As for EATING, however - no problems there. Guzzle guts is loving her foray into solid foods. After three days of sweet potato, and three days of pear, we moved into a new veggie: zucchini!

She wasn't particularly sold on the taste - to be fair, neither am I. It does go quite watery on its own, too. After the first day on it, I mixed up with sweet potato to give it a bit more texture. That went down much nicer.

After that, we moved to apple. That's usually a safe bet in terms of first impressions - I may or may not have been stealing mouthfuls of her puree while it was being warmed up. (Mwahahahaha.) Funnily enough, she pulled a few faces at the start; maybe she was expecting zucchini again and was shocked by the sweet flavour? But as soon as she got going, she had that mouth open like a baby bird - gobbled it up. At one point, she was leaning so far forward towards the food bowl that she almost had her nose in it. A definite hit!
Georgia is still breastfeeding at her normal 3-4 hourly feeds, and we do solids around lunchtime. As we have tried more and more combinations, we'll be increasing to breakfast time as well. So exciting! :)

It's time: Let the messy eating begin! We started solids a few days ago. Very, very gently - one ice cube (so a few spoonfuls) at a time & the same solid over a couple of days, so we can monitor for any potential reactions.

Sweet potato was up first, and she thoroughly enjoyed it. Wasn't sure about the spoon, and that took a little while to get used to, but I was surprised at how much she actually swallowed. On the third day of sweet potato, Georgia threw a temper tantrum and wanted more - so we ended up having two cubes. She was happy afterwards. :)

Today was a new solid: Pear!
She was a little puzzled at first, I think because she was expecting the sweet potato taste she had come to like! Once she'd gotten her mouth around the first few spoons, she polished it off pretty quickly.

I'd heard from a few mum friends that fruits like pear/apple were good to, er, get things moving - and it did the trick! After a few days of quiet on the bum front, today brought us some action. My first nappy change after purées - very interesting. ;)

We'll be doing pear for a few more days, and then will switch to a different veggie/fruit. At the moment, she's only having this one taster meal per day, which is usually around lunchtime. After Georgia has had a few different tastes, I'll be adding in a little rice cereal with fruit mixed in as a breakfast meal.

I did some more fruit & veggie shopping yesterday, since I was in the zone. :)

• 5x pears = 1 tray. It's a bit of a gritty puree, as pears tend to be, but nice and sweet.
• 6x small parsnips = 0.8 of a tray. Surprisingly, they smell stronger than they taste. I've never eaten them on my own before, only mixed in soups and stews. I let Georgia lick my finger after I pureed them, and she didn't seem too fazed. (She would have only gotten a microscopic amount, though.)
• 6x zucchinis = 1.4 trays. They were VERY watery, and smell gross.
• 1x can of peaches = 1.6 trays. It's not quite peach season here & I couldn't find frozen ones, so this had to do for now. I made sure to buy the organic kind in their own juice, no extras in there.
• 1x bunch of spinach leaves = 0.8 trays. Even mixed with boiled water to blend, this mixed down to nothing.

We opted to wait until nearer to 6 months before we started Georgia on solid foods. I wanted her to get as much benefit from breastfeeding as possible, especially since our start was a little rocky. Since she's found her groove and I want to keep my supply up, I saw no reason to rush into things. Plus, Georgia was born a little over 3 weeks early, so there was no harm in waiting that little bit longer.