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.

Truman's First Christmas

2013’s holiday season is coming to an end. Truman has experienced his first Christmas. Despite the awesome lion play station we gave him, I don’t think this will be a memorable Christmas for Truman. We’ll show him the pictures, proving he in fact was alive on Christmas day, 2013, but try as he might, he won’t remember.

A baby’s first Christmas is really a parent’s first Christmas, a family first Christmas. I’d say ours was a success. We opened our few presents. Truman played with the wrapping paper. I did my fatherly duty and put together Truman’s toy.

To my wife’s chagrin, we resorted to our usual holiday gift-giving practice of agreeing on gifts to buy ourselves online, though she did buy for me a very nice flannel shirt. One of my resolutions, other than maintaining this blog, will be to be a better gift buyer for April. I’ve never been good at this, be it Christmas, birthday, anniversary, or any other occasion requiring a present.  (Even April’s engagement ring wasn’t much of a surprise; she’d picked it out from an artist’s Etsy. When I bought it, April had been watching the item on the site, so she asked me if I was the buyer once she saw the ring was no longer available.) So I got a nice shirt and April got a yarn swift and a necklace.

As unmemorable as this Christmas will be for Truman, I will never forget it. Our small family, in our small apartment, with our small presents under our small tree, there’s not more I could ask for, and nothing more that I need. 

Truman Has to Eat

Babies are all firsts. First breath, first cry, first car ride, first fart, first smile, first laugh. They roll over, it’s a first. They roll back, it’s a first. There are the big ones: first tooth, first word, first step. And then there’s minor firsts—no less picture-worthy in the minds of doting parents, but trivial, I would guess, to onlookers: first time he grabs something, first time she turns her head, first sitting up for more than a few seconds before their top-heavy heads carry them off at an oblique angle into the couch cushions. For these small first we applaud, we cheer, we say good job, cameras always at the ready for round two.

All these firsts just happen. Truman grabs his rattle for the first time, we yell out in wonder at his dexterous abilities, and then take a picture. He probably grabbed something while we weren't looking, but it’s a first for us. He stands up while I hold him in my lap: Wow, how he is growing! Another photo opportunity. He rolls over on his play mat, how strong! but he needed little coaching from us. (A small confession: we were concerned about his inability to roll. He remained stagnant while his cohort from breast feeding group rolled around like cirque-du-soleil acrobats. April actually looked up coaching methods on youtube. He refused to roll until one day he didn’t. No coaching needed. We were then worried he’d roll off the bed. Now we think he’s forgotten how to do it, and we don’t know if that’s good or bad.) Truman experiences these firsts on his own accord, more or less.

So when it comes to first food April and I have a bit of a philosophical conundrum. This first we control totally. (Let’s hope. He is grabbing everything, so his first food could easily be a chunk of the cat fur he’s just wrested from Prufrock’s tail.) What do we give him? Nothing processed like baby food from a jar. We want it to be something natural, something we see as food in shape and taste before we give it to him. The contenders, as of this writing, are avocado, banana, or sweet potato. On a whim, we tried to give him the tiniest sliver of avocado, but it slid from the corner of his mouth on a sled of drool before anyone realized we didn’t have a camera ready. April’s vote goes for sweet potato. I think I’m with her, but I also like the idea of giving him some avocado. It feels more “Californian.” There is a tradition of saving the pit and planting it, but then I think of the last avocado tree we tried to cultivate. New England winters are not kind to subtropical fruits.

At the end of this week Truman will be seven months old and he’ll be one hundred percent milk-fed. People are starting to ask if he’s eating solids. Our pediatrician talked to us about getting him on some food to help with his sleep, which has been a battle in and of itself. Truman has to eat food at some point. I’m really less concerned with what we give him and more concerned with the back end of the process. Breast fed babies have pretty easy poops. [SPOILERS! As in, the following poop talk might spoil your appetite.] They’re liquidy with little texture. Easily contained in diapers, barring any blowouts. The smell is minimal. But with the first real human food comes the first real human poop. The thing we are biologically, evolutionarily, repulsed by, will be waiting for me in the night.

Whatever we choose, I know we’ll have the camera, iPhone, and iPad ready, so this first will be a first forever immortalized on facebook and flickr. I think I’ll keep the subsequent poop under wraps. God knows there’s enough on the web about the different types of baby poop and what each means. Though it would be funny if a poop picture of ours was sold to some third party by facebook.

Official Number of Poops in this Post: 6