Baby Food Baby's Food

Bagel appears to be continuing a trend among my children, which is that they refuse to eat baby food.

To be fair, I would probably refuse to eat baby food too. Have you ever tasted the stuff? There's a Dutch Apple Dessert that's decent, but the rest of it is insipid. It's bland, and the texture-- well, I realize it's made for people without teeth to eat, but you can still make soft food without giving it the texture of juice.

Tiny Princess didn't care much for the stuff. She wanted to eat what we were eating; but then again she always wanted to do everything we were doing. At three months of age, she eyed our pizza hungrily, but would eat what she was given. By nine months, she refused all baby food and we scrambled to find her things soft enough to eat (tip: canned vegetables are nice). Sonshine refused to eat baby food unless it was seasoned. We put curry powder in his rice cereal and pumpkin pie spice in his squash.

Bagel, however, won't even fall for that trick. Every time we try to feed him baby food, he gags. He'll eat ground-up table food-- bananas, potatoes-- but he flat-out refuses even spiced baby food. His favorite foods so far seem to be dried apricots, gingerbread men (prefers them to teething biscuits) and the wedge-shaped slices I cut from my round loaves of homemade bread. The wedge shape enables him to lean over his tray and suck on the thick end of the wedge. Bagel seems to have a very low tolerance for anything canned when it comes to food. He's got to have fresh made food from scratch, or else it just isn't worth eating solids. I knew Bagel was my "gourmet" nurser, but I thought that was just a metaphor for babies who conduct a milk-tasting ritual ("sip, swish, and spit") at the breast before settling down to nurse.

I have a funny feeling that my kids, in the pre-existence considering the family assignment they would have, said to God "I don't care if she's not the best mommy, the real question is, can she cook? I've really got to have a mommy that cooks yummy food. From scratch."