Or...Why baby mouths should come with a funnel attachment.
We started solids today. Although how they can call that green goup "solid" is rather beyond me. And I guess if you want to be technical, we started the boys on cereal a couple weeks ago. But I digress. Today, we tried GREEN BEANS! Here's how this story begins:
When the boys had their 4-month checkup, the Doctor gave us permission to get going with "solids", starting with cereal. At 5-6 months, we were supposed to start adding vegetables if the boys were interested. What...was I expecting them to start jumping up and down shouting "hey mom, give me some mashed up peas!"??
Cereal went pretty well. I mean, I doubt they would have been too bummed if I left it out of the menu, and they really still prefer their bottles in case of tantrum, but it didn't suck. So yesterday, a couple days before their 5-month 'birthday' and feeling a bit confident, I was at the store and decided to at least purchase some of the stage-1 vegetables.
My first observation is this - these little containers are tiny. The baby-food people should take a lesson from the wine people. A moment earlier, when I was in the wine department, they had a handy reusable 6-pack wine carrier...and if I filled it up, I got 10% off my purchase. Well, you can bet I filled that up! So that's what they should do with these little baby food jars - give me some sort of larger receptacle for gathering up the little tiny jars. In fact, make it some sort of receptacle that not only helps me keep the jars together in my shopping cart, but make it fit right into my pantry. As it stands, I can't quite figure out how one is to store these little things, so they're living on my kitchen counter...along with all the other detritus of twin life.
Before I loaded up my 10 little tiny packages of baby food (2 packages each of 5 veggies...and unlike the baby food of my past, these come in handy little 2-packs of plastic containers which will probably start multiplying in landfills and 10,000 years from now, someone will say "and they called this 'solid food'?"), I took one moment to contemplate whether it would be better (I don't know how to define 'better') if I were to make my own baby food. That moment passed quite quickly, and into the shopping cart they fell.
So today, we gave it a shot. Morning naps went quite well and I had the boys on opposite schedules today so that I could spend some quality time with each one individually. I was feeling quite daring, and my nanny had done all the baby laundry yesterday, so I was flush with bibs. Michael was first to get up, and he was pretty cheerful, so I wouldn't have to go straight to the bottle. I gave him one teaspoon full of green beans (the teaspoon from the silverware drawer, not the cooking gadgets...I don't know how accurate a "teaspoon" it really is), and he happily ate the entire bowlful. At the first bite, I did get a little look that said to me "ummm...really Mom? you think I'm going to like this?", but then after some lick smacking, I think he decided it was OK. At least good enough to stick his hand in his mouth to grab some to save for later.
William was next. While I was dishing up his portion, I sang a bit of the "my dog Lima loves to roam, one day Lima left his home. he came back so nice and clean. where oh where has Lima Been?" song which always makes him giggle. Then he practically devoured his bowl of beans. The pictures don't show that he's as happy as Michael, but he's smaller, so he takes his eating very very seriously. Once the beans were gone, he went straight to the bottle of formula and downed that in mere minutes. The boy wants to grow!
Well, after feeding the babies their green beans, their bibs were covered in green-ness...yuck! But a wise woman (my mother) suggested that I try soaking them in some Oxy-clean. (I have been fortunate, up to this point, that I have not needed the magical powers of Oxy. The only blow-out we've had resulted in a not quite fitting anymore outfit being thrown right into the trash at Children's Hospital). So in the time it's taken to write this entry, the bibs are back to their original colors. Green Bibs will not be necessary today.
Well, after feeding the babies their green beans, their bibs were covered in green-ness...yuck! But a wise woman (my mother) suggested that I try soaking them in some Oxy-clean. (I have been fortunate, up to this point, that I have not needed the magical powers of Oxy. The only blow-out we've had resulted in a not quite fitting anymore outfit being thrown right into the trash at Children's Hospital). So in the time it's taken to write this entry, the bibs are back to their original colors. Green Bibs will not be necessary today.
