What A Mess!

Recently, my daughter started her journey into solid foods. I was excited for this gastronomic milestone because it meant that there was something new for us to do together, as well as training her for much better food to come.

But, just as you must learn to crawl before you can walk, must learn to eat muck before you eat filet mignon.

When I had envisioned my daughter's first foods in the past, I imagined pureed peas, carrots, and other such vegetables, which didn't sound very appetizing to me, but I knew it was a starting point. What I didn't know is that babies don't even get that lucky, as the most common first food is rice cereal. (And, not the kind with Snap, Crackle, and Pop!)

If you have ever watched any kind of futuristic science fiction movie and noticed that everyone is eating some sort of pale flavorless glop, what I believe they are eating is rice cereal. Rice cereal has the texture of wallpaper paste and the taste of, well nothing.

So, on the day we had decided to start our daughter on solid foods, I sat her up in the high chair that had been sitting in the kitchen since I had assembled it the day after the baby shower, strapped on a new bib, and got the video camera ready to film my wife feeding our baby her first solids.

The event went off easily enough, there was very little mess, and our daughter seemed to enjoy the experience (as much as one can enjoy eating paste.) So, for the next feeding I took a turn at it.

Bad idea.

It should be noted that I am barely capable of feeding myself in a cleanly manner. I don't have any neurological disorders that I know of (besides being a parent) but for some reason I am always the messiest person at the table. If we go out to dinner and everyone has a piece of bread before the meal, my entire corner of the table will end up covered in crumbs while everyone else's seats look as though they haven't had anything at all. As hard as I try, I can't not make a mess when I eat.

That fact would also pose a problem when attempting to feed my daughter for the first time.

As I sat down with rice cereal in hand, expecting to have the same clean experience that my wife had, I quickly realized that I was wrong in my assumption.

My daughter, who had sat perfectly still during my wife's turn at feeding her, decided that she now wanted to be more involved and "help" daddy by grabbing the spoon and guiding it to her mouth herself. Babies, however, don't have the best dexterity at six months, so her attempts to "help" resulted in her grabbing the "business end" of the spoon and getting rice cereal all over her hands.

Neat!

As I paused to grab a washcloth to clean my daughter's hand off, I failed to move the bowl of rice cereal far enough away from her so that she couldn't do what she did next, which was to drop her hands onto the side of the bowl, spilling half of the contents on the table part of the high chair.

At that point the flailing started.

Not only do babies not have a great amount of dexterity at six months, but they also don't have complete control of their limbs, or at least they pretend not to. As I started to attempt to clean up the mess that was now on the highchair, my daughter decided that she wanted to start moving her hands around in the general vicinity of her face, which resulted in her suddenly growing rice "eyebrows", rice "side burns", and my personal favorite: rice "nose plugs". (Which really shouldn't have quotation marks, because they did effectively act as nose plugs.)

Needless to say, it was quite a mess.

If there were a licence issued for feeding your children, I probably could have passed the written exam but I definitely would have failed the road test.

While there were many areas of my performance that went wrong, I think the one area that had the most impact on the mess that I had created was stopping to clean up my mess as I went along. Babies are surprisingly quick, and I think that if I had not given her that one second to drop her hands onto the side of the bowl, as I was trying to clean her hands, at least the bulk of the mess could have been avoided.

Luckily, after several practice sessions, I have been able to hone my skills as a solid food feeding machine, and can swiftly empty a bottle mashed green beans into my daughter's mouth within moments, with barely a drop on her bib.

Next stop: filet mignon! (Hey, a dad can dream can't he?)