A love/hate relationship with food

Feeding Jacob solids is going extremely well. Looking at my fat baby, you are probably not surprised to know that he greets all foods with great pleasure and an equal diligence to consume them as quickly as possible. We started out fruity -- bananas, applesauce, peaches, prunes, mixed berries -- and tried out some carrots along the way. The past week we discovered that he is just as happy to suck down some vegetables, including peas. He loves squash perhaps more than anything. Especially warmed.

In the baby books and all over the internet, you can learn lots about how to feed your baby. They even suggest that it might take a long time, and that it might be messy. But (much like parenting itself) you never realize just how extreme in those adjectives things can go until you are, literally, in the thick of it.

I give you... "messy".

{prunes)


(peas)

I'm only showing you what's above the tray, not what's buried in his clothes, under his butt, or on the floor. I'm also not showing you the terrible food aftermath, what it does to his skin. The prunes gave him a face rash. They were too caked-on and sticky to get off right away, and they mischievously sat and irritated his cheek chub. With any pureed food, he requires almost instantaneous wiping-off or he explodes in contact rashes. Nothing serious, mind you, not that it ever even bothers him (and his poor brother, who was fed a bunch at day care, endured cheek rashes until he was feeding himself), but it makes his cheeks very slightly less pinchable. If that's possible.

It usually takes Jacob about 30 minutes to reach critical fuss while strapped in his high chair; this is how I gather he's done. He takes so long because he mostly insists on feeding himself. While he does enjoy shoveling his baby food in his mouth with his hands (as well as painting his tray with it), usually his smooshy foods are supplemented by appropriate finger foods, like Cheerios or those Gerber puffs, but he also wants what's on your plate, like noodles from big brother's soup, or bits of cooked green bean or carrot. Some of these go in his mouth. Most of them are scooped up in his ample grubby fists, held far over the side of his chair, and then observed with calculation and intensity as they are purposefully dropped towards the floor.


While 30 minutes does not sound like forever, and, with just one to feed, really would not be bad at all, I must remind you of the dragging of time brought about by relativity when there is another young person thrown in the mix. During this eternity, which I must spend planted in a seat in front of Jacob's to either keep it coming or keep him from choking, poor Isaac is collapsed in a heap from the sheer injustice of being ignored for so many minutes at one stretch. This week has been hard on him, because now we are feeding Jacob twice a day. At dinner it is pretty easy -- we all eat at the table together, and Isaac has that Daddy-figure all to himself. But breakfast is something else. Mostly I ask the Heroes to babysit for me while I feed Jacob. Sometimes we eat together at the kitchen table, or I coerce Isaac into snacking or coloring to pass the time. But sometimes he cries from in his room as Jake and I are mid-jar, "Mommy, come play with Isaac? Please please please?" And just who is supposed to feed Jacob when his Mommy is being stabbed through the heart?

In short, the big-people food? Jacob loves it. I hate it.