Spaghetti!

Did you see that picture?!?! Not only is my child eating SPAGHETTI, she is also feeding it to herself!!!!! If you have read this blog for any length of time or if you know my child at all, I'm sure you can understand what a HUGE enormous milestone this is for us! Words simply cannot express how excited Derek & I were at dinner last night! It was such a big night for all three of us! Now here's the back story....

We had just driven back home from Pensacola earlier that afternoon, and all three of us were tired after a fun but busy weekend at the beach. Derek & I often wait until Shelby has already gone to bed to eat our dinner b/c it's just a lot easier that, but Derek was really hungry yesterday evening so he requested that we go ahead and eat with Shelby. Since we were tired and didn't feel like cooking, we just decided to eat some leftover spaghetti that we had in the fridge. The three of us sat down to dinner, and I decided to let Shelby do some food with play with the noodles and meat sauce (we had cooked some ground beef and mixed it with a jar of Ragu). Shelby's OT always encourages us to do food play b/c she says that if Shelby won't/doesn't like to touch the food with her fingers, she certainly won't want to put it in her mouth. After about 5 minutes of playing with the noodles and meat sauce, Shelby was getting frustrated--she despises the texture/feeling of the noodles and they kept getting stuck to her hands, and she was getting pretty hungry by this point. For whatever reason, I grabbed her soon and just put a little of the meat sauce on it, and tried to give her a bite. I knew she wouldn't try it, but I just thought why not? Of course, she shook her head violently when I tried to give her a bite. So I just handed the spoon to her, and low and behold she put it straight in her mouth and swallowed! We could NOT believe our eyes! She proceeded to eat about 20 or 30 more bites of the meat sauce! It was seriously unbelievable! And yes, I said 20 or 30 bites of the meat sauce. If Shelby so much as saw a speck of a noodle on her spoon, she wouldn't eat it! High maintenance, much?! Ha! But we were seriously just SO incredibly proud of her! This was the PERFECT way to end our weekend! Enjoy a few more pictures of our big girl feeding herself and eating meat sauce spaghetti for the very first time! We are so proud of you, Shelby-girl!!!