That’s our girl dutifully tucking in her chin while she sucks up kefir in her honey bear! Way to go Quail! We’ve been thickening her breastmilk with a variety of foods- mangos, prunes, pears, cinnamon to coax her into complying with Sarah Rosenfeld Johnson’s straw hirearchy. We regularly lecture on the virtues of the chintuck and the importance of it during drinking to her overall health. But try explaining the physics of a straw to a nine-month old. It’s been slow going. The beauty of the flexi-straw in the honey bear is our ability to squeeze some of the liquid up into her mouth. We’ve been working on it since October. We’ve gotten good lip closure and she greets that bear like it’s Yogi Bear come to life when she spies it in any corner of the room. But it wasn’t going much beyond our squeezing the liquid up. And then we realized that Zuzu’s favorite drink was the right consistency for the honey bear- and better yet- Earthfare Grocers sells drinkable plain whole milk yogurt! We added it and voila…she sounded like Maggie Simpson…suck…suck…suck. After one or two more tries with me appling a tiny bit of pressure she managed to start sucking it up without help. We’re still working on straw positioning in her mouth and her not leading into the drink with her tongue. But there is still much happy drinking doing on at our home!