Kicking the New Year Off Right

This is exactly how I hoped I would be able to start my 2010 posts!

Today at lunch I served water, whole milk in a cup with a bendy straw (our favorite food and utensil), and Beech Nut blueberries with applesauce mix puree, and original flavor Baby Mum-Mums (the thing least desired by Cameron & Evan). While they have tolerated just a couple of spoonfuls of purees, they never really have ever tolerated textured foods, especially hard, rough and crunchy foods.





The boys have been so ill and so refluxy and this stomach virus we had this week was nasty, so I did not expect anything but the water to be gone at the end of our lunch session. With babies in chairs all suited up, dog in her assigned clean-up duty spot, I prepared for the worst and shortest lunch feeding session ever.



And I was extremely surprised.

The water is a staple and very much loved and needed in any form. The milk was not wanted at all, not even when Mommy blew big foamy bubbles. The warm blueberries and applesauce mix was a hit. Why? Because it was feed Mommy day today. Today I started having the boys feed me their puree with no intentions of my trying to feed it to them at all. Now, it's not like I have never had them try to feed me before. I have and will stand on my head to get them to want to put food in their mouths. But for some reason today it was big fun. We sang "Stir, stir, stir the soup! Stir along with me! We can stir the alphabet, right from A to Z." for which we can thank our Fisher Price activity table for, and they would stir and shove their plastic spoon in my eagerly waiting open mouth and watch me slobber and suck and chew that spoon until they peed their pants with laughter. Yes, I told you I make a damn fool of myself. If there were paparazzi on my backyard fence they would see the whole show through our kitchen sliding glass doors.

And then the boys would take turns stirring some more, look at the spoon, look at me, look at the spoon, and gently put the food covered spoon in their mouths. At that point I would redirect my attention to the other kid and play the same silly game so as to not "pay attention" to the first kid's reaction to his own food sample. And back and forth for 20minutes like this. There was no way to guess how much they consumed because it was such tiny amounts on the spoon, but the activity of putting food on a spoon and putting it to your mouth and tongue for yourself was pleasurable and repeated and that made it a success. It was a great sticky mess and great fun, and the stuff tastes delicious so I like it too.

When I started seeing signs that they might be winding down from this fun I pulled out the Baby MumMums. For those of you who haven't heard of these they are a surfboard shaped rice cake wafer that when you bite it it becomes powdery and dissolves very quickly in your mouth. They come flavored but we have the original so they taste like slightly sweet rice cake, very mild with virtually no scent. They are the best transition to dryer and crunchier textured foods that I have found so far and they are quite tasty.

I have had tiny successes at convincing the boys to let me put a piece in their mouth without getting too upset or gagging too much, and on a couple of rare occasions they have each bitten off a piece but then gagged and threw up because they didn't know what to do with it once it was in their mouth. I offer the wafer and then eat my own wafer, showing them what to do with it, making large exaggerated open mouthed gestures so they can see what my mouth is doing. I nibble loudly, crunch with my teeth and molars, rub the wafer on my teeth, make a show of having crumbs on my face and allow pieces to rest on my tongue so they can see how to deal with food in the mouth. I make happy pleased sounds, smile, and swallow exaggerated loudly and say "Ahhh..." with an open mouth so they can see the food is gone. Cameron and Evan are both fascinated and always watch very attentively. When I present the wafer to them they usually frown, look away, sometimes gag at the site of it. Other times they will hold it try to smash it into the table, dunk it in their milk, and mostly drop it on the floor much to Bridget's and Chewie's delight.

Today both boys bit off SEVERAL bites, chewed, pushed the food around with their tongues, gagged and swallowed without so much as a tear. They nibbled with their teeth and Evan really enjoyed scraping the wafer on his bottom teeth and then tonguing the food. Evan did gag three times, throw up once when a piece just a tiny bit too big got stuck to his tongue and he couldn't move it on his own. Cameron gagged but never threw up. This went on for about another 15minutes and the whole time I continued to make a complete and utter fool of myself with my own wafer of Baby MumMum. We went through two packs (there are two wafers in each individual pack). Poor Bridget got slighted and didn't have any Baby MumMum's herself, but I couldn't let her go unrewarded for her due diligence to keep the kitchen tidy while being pelted with spoons, toys and sippy cups and so she got a regular old dog cookie. It was the best and longest lunch ever. I'm stuffed.