Truman Eats

At close to eleven months Truman rates at about 90% on the milk baby purity scale. That is, his diet is still mostly breast milk.

April and I subscribe to the “Food until one is just for fun” school of thought on feeding the T-man.  Truman emphasizes the fun, and not so much the food part of the equation.

What food we give him will spend some time in his mouth, but will likely end up on the floor, or in a mushy paste in between his fingers, impervious to wet-wipes.

Sweet red peppers, one of his favorites, Truman will gum until he loses interest. I think he likes the texture more than anything. We slice them long and thin so he can grip them. When he is done, I’ll find most of what we gave him crushed into the seat of his high chair. He also likes cheese, but eating it means me holding a piece in front of his face so he can lean forward and lick it until it’s soft enough to take a bite. I then have to make sure he swallows the bolus of cheese in his mouth before he takes another bite or a waxy glob of goop will end up somewhere on his clothes or on the floor ready to be stepped on by a bare footed April.

Other food he’s experimented with: green beans, crust, both bread and pizza, banana, apple, avocado, carrots, and crackers.

We’ve also tried to give him jarred purees. He liked these for about a day, or rather, he let me feed him jarred baby food for about a day. Not long after, he much preferred feeding himself with the spoon. As soon as the spoon was close enough, he’d grab for it. Yes, yes, good grabbing, what a big boy, but I’d estimate about five percent of what is on the spoon makes it to his mouth, and even less into his stomach. Some will stick to his face, his nose, his eyelids, hair, ears, in his neck creases. (New parents! Make sure you clean those creases, both neck and nether!) The rest ends up on his hands and tray, transformed into baby art, my feeding him devolving from a meal into a session of sensory play with apple sauce.

Like I said, more fun, and not so much food.

We’ve given him some other baby-specific foods. He likes dried yogurt chips. They have the consistency of a communion wafer but come in three different fruit flavors. He also gets Little Yums teething biscuits. He likes to nom on these, but since their prime ingredients are rice flower and sugar (It’s Organic!) what was a tasty biscuit soon disintegrates into a sticky pulp covering his hands and face, and clothes.

We’re not in any rush to get Truman on a solids-centric diet. He seems happy and healthy. But April has become a little weary of being Truman’s primary source of food. So we want to get him on a routine (always with the routine) of eating solids at least once a day, probably in the evening so we can go directly from high chair to bath tub.

[Spoiler Alert! Your appetite may be spoiled by the following poop talk.]

The one thing we haven’t dealt with is the whole “With human food comes human poop” ordeal. Truman’s BMs have remained, for the most part, unchanged in both consistency and frequency. Just a pepper here and a green bean there. Recently, though, he has graced us with some god-awful gas, blasting helter-skelter the apartment with sulfurous clouds.

He’s lucky he’s so cute.