Fine Dining

I'm no foodie, as anyone who knows me will certainly attest.  Well into my late 20's, my idea of three square meals consisted of cookies for breakfast, a condiment-free, topping-free salami sandwich for lunch and fast food or a microwave meal for dinner.  To be honest, not a whole lot has changed now that I'm domesticated.  My wife has helped me turn the tide against McDinners and I'm good for a veggie every other day or so, but beyond that I'm still a nutritional lost cause.  I bring this up because Gracie already has a more adventurous palate and well-rounded diet than I do despite being less than five months old.

Since Grace more than doubled her birth weight and had grown increasingly fond of gnawing on her fingers, toys and parents, the doctor thought it was time to ramp up her meal plan with two daily servings of stage one fruits mixed with oatmeal.  As you can probably infer from the opening paragraph, her new menu of apples, pears, bananas and peaches includes a host of foods that I haven't eaten in decades.

At first, it seemed like Grace was going to follow in my fruitless footsteps, outright rejecting her first exposure to apples by begrudgingly consuming only about a third of her meals.  Her immediate and totally understandable resistance to this new, foreign experience sent Carrie and I into an irrational first-time parent panic, leaving us convinced that we were starving our precious baby.  Fortunately things changed once we switched from apples to bananas.

Grace took an undeniable liking to the fruit that shares her gestational nickname, allaying our fears while proving her parents surprisingly prescient.  Timid nibbles gave way to voracious mouthfuls.  Within a week, Grace was taking charge of her feedings, grabbing the spoon and guiding it into her mouth, her Baby Ninjitsu on full display.

Now, kung-fu spoon skills or not, the aftermath of a feeding is a sight to behold.  I think that this is a case where pictures should tell the story that words cannot.

 

Today, after a couple of rotations through her fruit selection, bananas have been supplanted as Grace's favorite by pears, with peaches following closely behind.  Apples have gone from the worst thing she's ever tasted to tolerable.  The only fruit she hasn't liked is prunes, though as a caveat they were given to her to help relieve some tummy trouble.  We didn't expect our baby to like prunes.  No one expects a baby to like prunes.  As far as I know, no one expects anyone to like prunes.