The Trixie Update

We’ve been feeding Trixie solids for 2 months now. As readers know, we started her on the ever-present Rice Cereal. It’s become strangely familiar and comfortable since that first awkward encounter. I’m so used to the smell (and taste) now that it’s hard to remember how much it offended during those early days. Now Rice Cereal is added to just about everything she eats.

We then moved on to baby food. I still think it’s funny that it’s actually labeled “baby food”, i.e. food for babies. This is such an elegant idea. It makes me wish for jars of “adult food” for those days when I’m not sure what I’m hungry for. Trixie has plowed through 35 various jars of Squash, Sweet Potatoes, Peas, Carrots, Green Beans, Pears, Peaches and Bananas, introduced in that order. At about 45¢ a jar, this makes her food costs an extremely reasonable $7.87 a month.

On the heels of the baby food, we introduced a few miscellaneous items. She has been eating Cheerios for about a month now, and we began yogurt when she started her antibiotic.

Of all the foods, the Cheerios are the most interesting. Prior to Trixie, I only regarded cereal by the bowl-full. However, when you dole it out on a piece-by-piece basis, you become aware of immense variation among the individual pieces. There are giant puffy Cheerios, hard shriveled ones, flattened ones and thin ones.

(The giant puffy ones are the best.)

We started by quartering the Cheerios because we were so terrified of her choking. This lead to half-Cheerios and eventually we ventured to give her an entire one. Now she attempts to feed herself by the fistful. This is pretty funny because she has enough coordination to bury the Cheerio in her little fist, but not enough to guarantee that when she shoves her fist in her mouth the Cheerio will be left behind. This leads to sticky, soggy Cheerios stuck everywhere.

To Trixie’s extreme excitement, I had been throwing a handful down on the floor (picture feeding ducks at the park.) After a few minutes, I check her progress. And to my excitement, they would be all gone — until she crawls off and I see that the Cheerios are stuck all over her feet and butt. I estimate less than 10% actually end up in her mouth. Now I’ve gone back to rationing them out one at a time.

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The lesson here is that you really can’t do paperwork with an infant around. She got this piece of paper in her mouth faster than you can blink. In the second it took me to grab her, she had already torn off a few pieces. I could see the scraps of paper stuck all over her tongue as I tried to scoop them out, but she was just as desperately trying to swallow them and hollering all the while. As you can see from the photo, I got a little of what I wanted and she got a little of what she wanted. I would probably call it a tie.

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