u/Novel-Evidence9165

Hi! My baby has been somewhat slow on her solids journey because she absolutely REFUSED to pick up any food and put it in her mouth. And she was quite hesitant about us putting random new food items in there too.

So she's been mostly breastfed and eating iron enriched oatmeal with fruit puree and nut butters , and she would also eat mango smoothies, mango, strawberries, cherries, raspberries, kiwi, oranges, clementines, bone marrow, bits of chicken, bits of hotdog and some savoury purees.

This last week she finally started self feeding! Hooray! But now I'm not sure what to prep for her. We have done hot dog bits and chicken, plus fruits. She does have an allergy to egg for which she has an epi pen, so she can't do anything with egg.

Looking for advice on what your favorite finger foods are for 10+ month olds that don't incorporate eggs and are relatively easy to prep?

I know babies aren't supposed to have any stuffed animals until 1 yr in the crib for sleeping. But my 11 month old baby has recently become super attached to a small rubber duck. It's small enough for her to hold in one hand but too big to put in her mouth (she also almost never puts objects in her mouth anyway).

If she's tired she will often try to fall asleep on the playmat or bed holding her ducky. Then I take it away and put her in her sleep sack and in the crib, but she holds tight to the ducky even when asleep and removing it wakes her up.

What are the risks of allowing her to keep it for naps? I don't think she could suffocate as it's not really an object that could cover her airway?

I recently posted super excited because I had removed a Japanese barberry at the front of our yard and replaced it with native shrubs.

The key thing about our yard is that it's a shared yard. We live in an attached house and share the yard with a neighbour. Before she bought the house on her side, I had done a lot of gardening and put in hundreds of dollars of plants (annual and perennial) and soil to amend the clay. There were also existing plants including the Japanese barberry. I always hated it but I didn't know it was invasive or know anything about native plants at the time.

Anyway our neighbour moved in and needed to do some foundation work. This necessitated ripping up most of the front yard. Unfortunately the barberry was spared from the carnage, as were some hydrangeas, but most everything else was destroyed. We had a year of just clover and destruction, but this year we decided to put in a proper garden.

We spoke with the neighbour and she mentioned wanting native plants. This led to me doing a deep dive on native plants and realising it was a great idea. She also mentioned she hated the barberry and would get it removed and my heart literally sang.

She purchased a lot of soil to replace what had come out for her foundation, as well as 5 native plants and myself and my husband repainted the foundation wall behind the bed, regraded the slope to have an angle away from the house, put in about 30 native plants.

Then eventually I removed the barberry myself because I had some free time and she was away on vacation. She had extensively said she hated it but was not able to remove it herself due to back pain. She was shopping around for tree removal and trying to coordinate with our down the street neighbour so that his tree guy could remove it when he had another tree removed. While she was gone that neighbour had his tree removed without contacting us to sort out the barberry.

Anyway she got back this week, and promptly went out and bought another barberry in a different colour and planted it back.

I'm shellshocked. I thought she also hated it but maybe she just hated the color. I should definitely have confirmed with her that she still wanted it out but I thought it would be a nice surprise and I had let her know via email while she was away (so that she could stop looking for quotes on removal).

I am not looking for validation on whether I was wrong to remove it while she was away, on reflection I can see that it was not the best move. Just looking for someone to share the barberry despair with me 😭 I was so so excited it was gone. And maybe some reassurance that the other native plants I added still "count".