Adventures in Eating

I haven’t posted much about my daughter Boo Bear since her birth for a number of reasons, chief amongst them being that I’m afraid she’ll come to me when she’s fifteen with printed out copies of this blog ranting and raving that my writing about her ‘is RUINING my social life’ this and ‘Why are you so embarrassing?’ that and ‘This is the reason I should be legally emancipated’ blah blah blah we’re both seeking counseling blah.

But she’s so cute and adorbs and awesome at this stage that it’s hard not to blab about her. As exhibit A I give you last night. Well maybe last night is a bad example, because it did have my stomach churning there by the end but that wasn’t really her fault exactly. I blame Gerber’s pureed peas* because they DO NOT look very appealing coming back out as they do going in.

[*edited because pureed pees is much worse than pureed peas and no wonder my stomach was turning!]

So yes, she’s just over four months now and is eating pureed food and it is…. It defies words, this experience does. She talks when she eats and gets crabby and a little bit yelly when she doesn’t to hilarious effect. Probably the written word won’t do it justice but I’ma try anyway.

So I start to feed her and the process makes her so happy that she oohs and aahs while I’m feeding her. I’ll put a spoon to her mouth with food on it and she gives me this deep guttural ‘uuuuuhhhhh’ letting me know just how happy and content the experience is making her. And then, during the 3.2 seconds that I take the spoon away to get another spoonful of food and then bring it back to her mouth, she “Ah, Ah, Ah"'s her displeasure at not have another spoonful of food IMMEDIATELY until I am able to get that spoonful of food back into her mouth and then its ‘uhh, uhh, uhh” again and the cycle repeats itself over and over again until we have finished and I wipe off her face and she then voices her displeasure at having her face cleaned and then we’re done.

Last night was a little different. I was reintroducing peas to her. She started out with peas but hadn’t had them in some time, so I thought it would be good to re-establish them into her diet. I can’t decide if that was a mistake or one of the greatest decisions of my life, because it was hilarious but also kind of gross. Somehow our cues were off last night and I kept getting that spoonful to her mouth right while she was mid ‘uhh, uhh’ and she would spurt the spoonful everywhere. I know kids at this age usually wear more food than they eat but the splatter zone on this was impressive. The whole time all I kept thinking of was how much of a resemblance she bared to Randy from ‘A Christmas Story’ and I couldn’t stop chuckling to myself. Also, her high chair and tray started looking like a lost Jackson Pollack painting by the end. Had this been pureed sweet potatoes, I would’ve found it just hilarious but for some reason, it being pureed peas, I found the whole endeavor both funny and queasy making. But do you know who I ended up feeling sorry for during this whole exercise? The bib! For some reason the bib and the collateral damage it took reminded me of the bib in that one scene in Monty Python and the Meaning of Life with the Fat Guy who binged and purged until the Thin Mint did him in, and the abuse that poor bib took during that scene. And then I started feeling sorry for both the bib in that scene and the bib my daughter was wearing and now I’m feeling sad that the bib in such an insignificant piece of clothing that has to take on so much collateral damage from infants and toddlers everywhere!