Growing Up Foodie

Food, glorious, food. That pretty much sums up my take on eating.

Food is completely at the center of my family life. It’s not only what most of us spend our free time doing–we garden, we read food magazines and Web sites, and we watch foodie TV shows like “Iron Chef”–but it’s the reason we get together. From backyard barbecues and fish frys to Thanskgiving and Sunday dinners, bring the food and the family will show up. The act of designing, preparing, cooking, presenting, and sharing  a meal is our most comfortable expression of love.

So, given the starring role food plays in my family’s life, you can imagine how ecstatic I was when I took baby to the doctor for his four-month check up and he said I could start introducing solids–rice cereal, oatmeal, and a first fruit and veggie. Happy, happy, joy, joy!

Now, it might seem a little early, if you believe a lot of what you read. Lots of expert sources say to refrain from introducing solids until six months of age. But I really felt baby was ready. He’d more than doubled his birth weight–he’s pushing 18 pounds already–and if that rule of thumb wasn’t enough, he was definitely starting to get very interested in whatever I was eating. I caught him eyeballing an apple a few weeks ago with such desire that I held the gnawed-on core up to his face so he could smell it, if not get a little taste on his lips.

So, it was with much glee that I hit the solid food aisle in Target for baby’s first meal. What was it going to be? Plain old rice cereal? Oatmeal with bananas? Rice cereal with fruits? I wanted to buy them all, but I settled on two boxes–one big one of the plain old rice cereal and a smaller one of oatmeal with bananas.

Once home, I immediately put baby into his bouncer chair and I busted out a bib for its inaugural dirtying. While some mommy-friends suggested putting some cereal in a bottle at first, I decided to live a little dangerously and opt for a first spoon feeding.

Here’s the first-hand account of how it went:

It was so fun! And I couldn’t believe how quickly he caught on. After three feeding attempts, he pretty much got it (you’ll see clips from five feeding frenzies in the video). It was such an exciting moment that I found myself cheering, rather loudly as it would seem from the unedited versions of the video, when baby would take a big swallow or (better yet) actually grab my hand and try to pull the spoon into his mouth on his own.

I’ve never felt better about making a bigger deal out of a smaller thing.