Bon appetit!

So, after a false start, I am starting solids with Rachel for real this time (I think.) Rachel has been jealously eyeing and screeching over our food since she was about 4 months old, presumably when she first got an inkling of what we were doing and how much we were enjoying it. Having a two-year-old sister eat in front of her probably makes her want it even more.

I started out giving her licks and sips of this and that: soup, fruit, whatever seemed fairly innocuous in tiny amounts. It just made her food lust stronger, so at just over 5 months I mashed up a banana for her, which I was feeding to her when this photo was taken. She loved every minute of it, but didn't eat all that much before she was so ravenously hungry she wanted to skip straight to breastmilk (as far as I could tell; she nursed vigorously when I gave her the opportunity.)

Unfortunately, her next dirty diaper had chunks of undigested banana in it. She seemed pretty uncomfortable leading up to that diaper, so I thought I had better wait a few weeks.

In the interim, Rob gave her a gingerbread cookie (!), which she devoured in crumbly, messy bliss, but which also gave her gas and a hurty belly.

Now, roughly two weeks after the banana incident, I bought some organic baby food at HEB, the stuff we used to give to Natalie when we could afford it. I came out with 3 single packs each of butternut squash, sweet potato, roasted apple and roasted pear, figuring I'd try to be quasi-scientific about looking for allergies and such by introducing one food at a time for a couple of days.

Today she ate the butternut squash. More accurately, she ate 1/5 of the butternut squash, and watched Natalie polish off the rest. She was definitely interested in eating it, but I cut her off when she started gagging as she tried to swallow the last few bites. I use the term "bites" loosely--they are more like tiny sips at this age. I give her a spoon to hold whenever I feed her, a trick I learned with Natalie. So far, so good. Lots of fun, relatively little mess.

Natalie has never been picky about what she eats, only how she eats. As in virtually all other aspects of her care, she wants to be in charge as much as possible. Lately, her big thing is "dipping sauce". She wants a sauce (ketchup, salad dressing, tartar sauce, marinara, yogurt) to be served on the side of whatever main course she is eating (say, green beans, chicken, fish sticks or scrambled eggs). She will dip the weirdest combinations and love it. I've seen her eat ketchup-dipped green beans and yogurt-dipped bacon on multiple occasions.

She knows very well how to use a spoon and fork, but it's hard to predict whether or not she'll be in the mood to use them with a given food. We don't push it that hard; we draw the line at letting her throw and smear food all over the place--that ends the meal--but if she wants to eat scrambled eggs with her hands, by all means. We do remind her that she has utensils and can use them.

"Show Rachel" has been a big phrase in our house lately. "Show Rachel how you eat cereal with a spoon!" often results in at least one perfect spoon-to-mouth bite.

Of course it's still far to early to tell what kind of eater Rachel will be, except to say that she's approaching it with gusto so far.

Eating is kind of a big deal in my side of the family. My dad's side is Cajun, and he's quite the chef. We had fabulous dinners growing up. His forte (no surprise) is Cajun and French cuisine, but he tackles other cultural cuisines quite eloquently. My mom is also an excellent cook, self-taught, having to live with my dad's constructive, if sometimes back-handed and sharp, criticism.

I once went on a vegetarian kick in college. Wow, I knew my parents would make fun of me for it. I didn't know they would take it so personally, as an affront to the values I grew up with. They seemed to get over it by the time I gave it up and returned to meat-eating.

Introducing my children to the delights of gumbo and jambalaya is a rite of passage in this family. Natalie loves both dishes. I remember letting her sip gumbo broth as tiny thing, older than six months but not by much. I hope Rachel is equally enthusiastic. By all indications, she will be.