are things complicated yet?

How I turned an entire bag of spinach into 6 measly ice cubes

I've been making Claire's food for about two months now (though she's only been eating it for about 1) and I have to say that it's pretty easy.  You just steam up some fruits and veggies, toss them in the Cuisinart, give them a very satisfying whir to puree them, dump them in ice cube trays and stash in the freezer.

Last night I went on a binge - I made a ton of things in about 2 hours and I'm hoping that Claire will be pretty set up for a while and I won't have to clean all those stupid Cuisinart parts again anytime soon.

Just look at all the pretty colors!  Who wouldn't want to eat this yummy stuff?  My freezer looks mighty attractive when I open the door.

From left to right we have:  Carrot, Blueberry-Pear, Apple-Peach-Strawberry, Parsnips, Broccoli, Red Potato, Peas, Blueberry-Apple-Pear, Strawberry-Pear, Spinach, Sweet Potato, Zucchini, Butternut Squash, Corn-Potato-Carrot and Green Beans.

I have no idea why I just capitalized all of those foods as if they are proper nouns. 

Claire doesn't actually eat all this stuff yet.  Some items are new - like the spinach, corn, green beans and peas.  So far she's eating nearly everything we give her (and patting her tray impatiently when we don't shovel it in fast enough) and that's SO encouraging.  I really disliked the evening Serious Discussion With Claire wherein she pursed her lips and got really, really mad when we dared to offer her delicious pears.  Now?  Pears are among her favorites.

I am hopeful that she won't be a picky eater....but I'm not holding my breath that we won't go through a stage like that eventually.

It's a bit odd choosing what she's going to eat every day.  I'm trying to do an even mix of fruits and veggies plus some oatmeal.  I always wonder what she's in the mood to eat and if she ever thinks,

"Oh, just sweet potato?  I was hoping for maybe some carrots."

Sometimes I find myself trying to decide what I'd want to eat and then giving her that.

"Broccoli today?  Ugh!  No!  Let's do.....Squash!  It's a nice day for squash!"

Most of the time I find myself reaching for fruit.  Because hey - it's hot outside and the fruit ice cubes are pink and purple and so cute and delicious looking.  Plus, fruit is so darn yummy. I know she agrees with me on this one. 

She's always the most excited about fruit - any kind.  Her eyes get really big and her mouth hangs open the entire time once she figures out what's on the menu.  She especially seems to love the combinations of fruit and she will eat cube after cube of the stuff until I think she's about to explode.  (And sometimes?  She does!  All over the carpet!  Welcome to my home with blueberry spit-up stains in the living room.) 

We'll add in some cheese, yogurt, pasta and meats soon.  But, for now, the whole solid foods thing is going pretty well.  She's happy.  We're happy.  And bellies are full.

She's actually going to grow up, isn't she?

We are at the in-laws house this weekend and we are vacationing in high style.  We are taking advantage of their pool, kegerator and seemingly bottomless glasses of red wine.  Plus, every time we come in from the pool to refill a glass, a miraculous spread of snacks and dips appears in the kitchen courtesy my mother-in-law, Judy.  Judy can whip up some seriously good snacks.

AND, as if the booze and snacks weren't enough, other people want to hold my baby and bathe her and feed her and change her dirty diapers!  Seriously, they FIGHT over this.  It's like a Mom-cation.  (Did I really just say that?)

To take advantage of the Mom-cation to its fullest I invited a college girlfriend who lives nearby over for an afternoon of pool party.  She was painting her bedroom with her husband so she immediately abandoned him to come over.  (She's a smart girl.)  We swam, admired the baby and drank two bottles of wine while we gossiped about other people we went to college with.  It.  Was.  AWESOME.  (Memo to Ryan:  You chose poorly when you decided to keep painting today.)

I was going through pictures from this afternoon and I fetched the card from my in-laws camera.  Lo and behold:  they have photos on here from October, from when Claire was born.  Almost 8 months ago!  They have not downloaded photos since then!

It was fun to sort through some never-before-seen photos from those first few days.  She really WAS so tiny.  So cute.  So adorable. 

(And I really was so puffy.  So bloated.  So obviously hooked up to an IV pushing fluids.  No wonder my pants didn't fit for weeks and weeks.  Even my hands look puffy. )

***

Then...

...and now.  She's so much bigger only 8 months later.  I can't believe it.

7 months old

This is Claire at 7 months old.

This is the third time I've tried to get a photo of her sitting next to that stupid bear.  Because that's The Thing We Do.  We take a picture in the chair every month next to the bear.  In ten years I'll be all weepy at how fast she grew and I'll have a tangible marker of just how freaking fast it happened.  The bear photo must happen.

The photo has been pretty easy every month except for this one.  This month, Claire just has too much to do.  Too much to look at.  She can twist her body and climb on the arms and contort and jerk and DAMN she's strong.  I can't get her to sit still for anything.

I present you with the reject gallery.  (This is just a slice.  There are many, many more rejects.)

Our first try:

Honestly, CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS?

Okay...After this shot she literally leapt off the chair into my arms.  We are done for today.

Round 2

Started out much like Round 1, so we quit after one shot.  (What is on that table that is SO interesting?  It's a lamp.  Claire, do you love lamp?)

Round 3

"Hey!  What's over here!?  I'm still interested in that!"

Even though she looks like she's really mad here, she's actually laughing hilariously.  She also looks like she might be practicing her bull riding form. 

Okay Claire.  Fine.  We'll just play with the door stop in your bedroom.  That's much better than a stupid, fluffy, approved-toy-for-your age bear.  Sheesh.

 

Hang-dog honky tonk music + beer with tickets = AWESOME

I knew today was going to be awesome when Claire woke up at 730 and Chris went to fetch her and let me stay in bed.  Usually she is up at about 5 and usually (weekdays) I am the one who fetches her because on weekdays Chris is on his way out the garage door by 5.

But today I got to sleep in.  Until 8.  And it was just as heavenly and glorious as it sounds. 

Chris made me a chocolate almond latte and Claire sat on my lap and played happily while I perused the morning news on my laptop.  It was an idyllic Sunday morning.

We eventually got everyone dressed and out the door, which is a good thing because I was getting HUNGRY.  We hit up my favorite hamburger place.

Isn't that bow just darling?  Claire still has hardly any hair and what she does have is pretty light.  I saw a ten-week-old the other day that had a TON of hair and I suddenly realized that Hey!  My kid is kind of bald!  When she is dressed in green some people have even called her a BOY.   I've tried and tried to find some decent baby bows to put on her head but most of them are for newborn heads and not seven-month-old Melon Heads.  They're too tight and leave marks. 

Anyway, after the cheeseburger, fries, fried okra (MMMM OKRA) and fountain coke feast we moved on to a local street fair since the weather was nice.  I had wanted to go on Friday when one of my favorite bands was playing ("Pure Honky Tonk!"  Ha!  How could you not love that?) but we couldn't leave the house in time for the concert because there were seven sweaty men of undetermined trustworthiness crawling on the roof. 

Oh, didn't I mention that?  We got a new roof on Friday (thanks to last month's hail storm and it looks like we'll pocket some money too!  Thanks Homeowner's Insurance!  And, thanks for the hail God!  We were about due for a new roof).  The guy said they'd be done by 3 and they weren't actually finished until 830.  I'm happy that they finished (especially since it rained that night) but DAMN I would have liked to go listen to some honky tonk music, dance with my husband in the street and drink beer I have to buy with tickets while my baby slept peacefully in her stroller.

I even had FRIENDS lined up to go with us.  A bonafide SOCIAL OUTING!!  (Turned out to be a double no-show though because the guy in the other couple got bit by a brown recluse spider and was all wacked out and couldn't walk.  Boo.  No honky-tonk music for Mike and Erin either.)

So we went today instead.  It was nice!  There was no awesome hang-dog honky tonk music but that's ok.  I still bought some beer with tickets.

HAWAIIAN BEER actually.

See that?  Kona Brewing Company.  They must have hitched their wagon to Budweiser's distribution network becuase I can't imagine any other reason it was on tap in a tent next to buckets of Bacardi Mojitos (BLECHHHH).

We moseyed and enjoyed the cool breeze, looked at yard art that people were selling (thanks but no) and kids that had their faces painted and were carrying balloon animals.  We mused at how much fun Claire might think something like this is in a few years and how we probably wouldn't be able to drink as much beer then.

Claire fell asleep in her stroller on the way back to the car.

Good Sunday.

PS - Am in hammock with a Hoegaarden beer and my MacBook right now.  I LOVE TODAY.

Babies and Food: A combination that always leads to High Drama (Plus some bonus pictures just to make things interesting)

One day last week, Claire woke up and said, "I like food." 

 

Well, maybe she didn't actually SAY that since she's only 7 months old, but she is eating more foods now and that's kind of a big deal around here.  Pears, carrots, apples, sweet potato, oatmeal, avocado, brown rice and banana.  Tonight I whizzed up some zucchini, red potato, spinach and an apple/blueberry/pear combo.  We'll see how she takes to those over the next week or so.

She's excited about eating and reaches for food, tries to pick pieces up, opens her mouth wide, leans into the spoon and urgently pats her tray for more when I'm not shoveling it into her mouth fast enough.

It's nice to see her eating "real" food.  Even though she's still nursing, it feels like some of the pressure on me is off.  I'm no longer 100% responsible for making sure she thrives.  Dude, being someone's exclusive provider of food is a lot of freaking stress.

And speaking of stress, for the past 7 months I have sure felt it.  Birthing a child and figuring out how to keep her alive and well, recovering from said birth experience, figuring out how to be a mother AND a good wife AND a good employee AND remember that I am an individual all at the same time has been the craziest juggling act I've even taken on, with the steepest learning curve ever.

And you know what?  Sometimes I really suck at it.  REALLY SUCK.  Instead of just rolling with it and accepting that I can't do everything perfectly, I often let the smallish annoyances in life get under my skin.  I wish I could relax about the little things so that I can focus on the big things that are what really impact my day-to-day happiness. 

But I have flaws like everyone and my big one these days seems to be Focusing On Little Stuff.  Am working on that.  It's a difficult thing for a control freak like myself to manage to do.

***

I decided sometime last week to cut myself a break.  It's been a big month for that - I hired a housecleaner, I've been taking some more time for myself to do crazy-selfish things like style my hair in the mornings or iron my pants.  Cutting Myself A Break is the new trend in these parts.

Whatever the deal is, it's getting tougher for me to pump enough milk for Claire to have the next day.  We're out of frozen milk so it's been day-to-day for awhile.  We're making it,  but I have to pump once at night too so she has two full bottles while I am at work.  And I won't lie - once I get home I am pretty much not into pumping.  No pun intended, but it sucks.  I am tired of spending my time this way.

I figured that maybe we'd start supplementing with a bottle of formula once a day when she's at daycare.  Takes the pressure off of me, she still gets to nurse the majority of the time.  It's a good compromise.

I went to Wal-Mart and pondered the infant formula aisle.  I stared at all of the colors and teddy bears and acronyms and I realized that for all the research I'd done on breastfeeding I didn't know a damn thing about infant formula except that I think you mix it up like Nestle Quick.  (Water + powder = yummy drink?)

There were so many brands and types.  For "babies that spit up" and babies "with sensitive stomachs" and Organic and Advance "to support a developing immune system" and even a hypoallergenic one.  I was flummoxed.  They all sounded like positive things - which the hell one was I supposed to buy?

Every can said, "Of course, breastmilk is best for your baby...." It was SO infuriating and condescending in the most marketing-ese way.  I was FINE with my decision until I read THAT and then I started second guessing myself all over again.  It didn't say, "Do the best you can for your baby..."  Nope, it was very specific.  If you phrased it another way it could have easily said, "Our product is not the best thing for your baby."  Great.  Thanks for that.  Very supportive.

I refocused on the task at hand: taking home a can of formula so I'd at least have SOMETHING in the house.

I picked up the most plain one - the one that seemed like it was for a baby without any of the noted issues on the other cans - and went home.  I mixed up two ounces and planned to mix it in her cereal and if she liked it we'd try a bottle tomorrow at day care.  Good plan.

I tasted it.  It tasted like crap.  It actually tasted vaguely...chemical-y.  It was definitely odd. 

For reasons that are still unclear to me, I couldn't bring myself to give it to her, even though I KNOW THAT IT'S OKAY and it will not impact her future SAT scores. 

But it just tasted gross to me and if it wasn't something I'd drink I couldn't figure why I'd offer it to Claire.

So then I went back to Conflicted Mommy Town where I seem to feel simultaneously incredibly guilty and rock star awesome about the choices I make for my daughter.

Still there. 

***

Yesterday Claire was playing in her crib and managed to pull herself up into a standing position by using her crib rails.  

 

It took all of three seconds and after that she was dangling her arms over the side like a monkey.  I could just tell she was thinking about launching herself over the edge.  Chris lowered her mattress that evening.

***

I've been trying to take a photo of her next to that bear for her 7-month photo for a solid week now and it's just not happening.  Claire has far too much to see and play with to be bothered to sit still for a microsecond in that chair.

As soon as I sit her down she rolls over and stretches and pulls up on the arms and moves dangerously close to leaping off the whole damn thing.

Yesterday I only got two shots before I had to wrangle her.  And by "wrangle her" I mean scoop her up out of what is clearly the most dangerous chair in the house. 

(It rocks!  It glides!  It swivels!  It's TOTALLY UNSTABLE and it has low arms that she can launch off like a superhero in two seconds flat!  It's a death trap!  Why did we put it in our baby's room?!)

 

Yeah, not my finest photographic moment.  We'll try again tomorrow.

This is what I gave my mom for Mother's Day. (Don't worry, I'm taking her to the spa too.)

Dear Mom,

Happy Mother's Day!  I had grand plans for you this year.  Really, I did.  I had plans for more than a wimpy EMAIL to send to my mom on this year, this special Mother's Day when I became a mother and I finally understood both sides of the coin: having a mother and BEING a mother. 

I dreamt of a spa day - just you and me - or maybe some sort of Meaningful Gift that would sum up my feelings of Thank You For Being There For Me This Year and Thank You For Being An Amazing Grammie and even Thank You For Being Just An Awesome Mom To ME.  But the more I thought about it the more quickly time seemed to pass and here I am, it's Saturday and Mother's Day is tomorrow and it's far too late to even overnight a bouquet.

Clearly, I have some lessons to learn about time management as a mother.

Like so many of my grand and ambitious plans this year, I just didn't get to finding the Big Something Special for you because I was busy attending to someone else's very insistent and persistent needs.  Because that's the thing about being a mother - it's always about someone else, isn't it?  

After 7 months of mothering Claire I see now that you are a tough act to follow.  You are such an incredible mother and I can only hope and try my best to mimic what you did for me.  Holding my tiny baby girl in my arms last fall I was overcome with a sense of "Don't screw this up!" 

But how?  HOW does one not screw up a child and (consequently) turn them into a screwed up adult?  There seem to be so many people who don't get it right - seemingly normal people even.

And yet, you did a beautiful job.  (I turned out quite nicely, if I do say so myself.) You didn't even have The Internet.  (My go-to parenting resource for questions about things like "How to disinfect toys.")

I can now see the sacrifices you made for me.  If there's one thing about being a mother that is shocking in its magnitude, it's the sacrifices....Small and big, every day is just one long string of sacrifices that you make for your child.  Thirty years of choices you must have had to make, both simple and difficult, boggle my mind.  They are everyday things that singularly don't seem like much, but added up over the years make a huge difference.  These are the things that I am so very thankful for. 

I look back on my childhood and there are certain things that are clear to me now - things that as a child I was totally naive about and didn't realize that they were happening (or not happening).  These are things I want to do for Claire.  Thank you for being such an incredible example and giving me a plan of sorts to try and follow.

• Thank you for making me sit at the table until everyone was finished eating and making me try different things to eat.  Thank you for teaching me table manners and making me stick to them even when it was "just us" at home.  Adults without table manners are just really gross.

• Thank you for showing me how to properly clean a bathroom and kitchen.  There is no other mark of someone who knows how to clean than this.

• Thank you for letting us have a drawer in the kitchen dedicated to candy and snacks.  It was AWESOME and a lot of the time Rollin and I stuffed our faces with multiple servings of sweets before you got home.  It was great.

• Thank you for supporting me in whatever I wanted to try.  Soccer, writing, swimming, wearing my hair in a side pony-tail (actually, maybe you should have nixed that one), contact lenses in 7th grade, baking peanut butter cookies, putting photos of 80's heartthrobs on the outside of my bedroom door where you must have winced at seeing Kirk Cameron every day, experimenting with Sun-In in high school and going to bars in a third world country with my high school buddies.  (Just thinking about that last one with Claire makes me hyperventilate.  HOW?  HOW DID YOU ALLOW THAT AND NOT DIE INSIDE?)

•  Thank you for giving me an allowance and giving it to me on payday.  Thank you for letting me blow my allowance on licorice and poorly considered wardrobe items if I wanted to.

• Thank you for being so generous with your time.  For coming to every single boring sporting event and for making so much happen "behind the scenes" to create memories and smiles.

• Thank you for letting me turn into an adult at my own pace and learn my own hard lessons about life.  There's nothing like learning it the hard way to really make it stick.  (See also: What Happens When You Don't Pay Your Tuition Bill On Time, Unpaid Parking Tickets and Subsequent Warrant For Arrest That They Will Issue and Surprise! Finding a Job After College Isn't Always Easy.)

• Thank you for not killing me when I rear-ended someone in my car for the first time mere MONTHS after getting my driver's license.  Thank you for reacting in a wholly "These things happen, did you learn a lesson? Very good then, case closed," sort of way.  It was the first time I felt like I'd been treated like an actual person-becoming-an-adult and I remember it being a bit shocking that I hadn't been grounded or something similar.

• Thank you for trusting me as a teenager.  Knowing that my parents trusted me to make good decisions sort of produced the good behavior.  I knew what was expected of me and I behaved to that expectation and beyond.  Being a "bad" kid never even occurred to me as a possibility.

• Thank you for not forcing religion on me, but consistently exposing me to it at an early age. 

• Thank you for instilling in me a deep sense of family, loyalty and history.  There is no better story to me than one about my great-grandparents on the farm.  Knowing where I came from and the difficulties my ancestors went through, gives me a tacit sense of place in the world.

• Thank you for telling me that I have good common sense.

• Thank you for buying me new clothes at the start of every school year, even though I think sometimes it might have been a budgetary stretch.

• Thank you for being awesome with the whole Marine Corps Wife thing.  I know that it can't have been fun all the time.  (Such as, the time Dad went to war.  That sucked.)  More than anything, I have always thought that the experience of moving around a lot as a child made me a better person as an adult.  I feel like it made me more adaptable and open to change.  It made me fiercely independent and even by the time I was in ninth grade I knew that I didn't need a whole lot of people to get things done...Doing things on my own was fine and often turned out better for me.  I knew that if I could rely on myself then pretty much anything would be okay.  When I got to college, with my parents on the other side of the globe – it didn't even faze me as a big deal.  It was just another move.  I was completely oblivious to the trauma that goes with starting college because, to me, it was just another change in a long-established sequence.

• And, speaking of college, that's when I first realized that my parents were kind of awesome. Seeing everyone else's parents and their sometimes unreasonable and plain strange behavior made me think, “My parents are just...normal.  THANK GOD.”

You've always been a wonderful mom, but this year you were just above and beyond. 

I was so thankful to have you here after Claire was born.  I was so apprehensive of loads of people at the house and how was I going to play hostess but really, once she was here and once I was hopped up on painkillers I was so, so, so, GLAD that I had my mommy here to help me, no questions asked.   The cooking and cleaning and laundry were just incredible.  They are such small tasks but to me they meant so much.  Thank you.

I can tell that you are going to be the best Grammie ever.  Of course, your skills as a seamstress will ensure that she's the most stylish baby on the block, but I love how you read to her and say new words to her clearly while you point at objects and show her how to crawl and roll over.  (The last two are entertaining for EVERYONE, by the way.)  Your enthusiasm and drive to make sure that she is another successful baby girl in our family is so sweet.

I don't know how we can mess up with someone like you to look after us.  Chris and I are so happy that you live so close and that we can see you so often.  I can't wait to watch her grow up and have you in our lives to play a part in her childhood and help us turn her into the amazing woman I know she will be some day.  (Memo to Claire:  The High Expectations.  We have them for you.)

Hopefully, in 25 or 30 years on Mother's Day she will be just as appreciative of me and I will tell her, “Well, your Grammie sets a good example for me to follow.  She is the best mother ever and I just hope you think I'm half as good as she is.”

I love you Mommy.  Happy Mother's Day.  Claire and I love you so very much.

Love, A'Dell

This photo was taken by my kick-butt baby photographer, Angela Majerus.  She's pretty much the sweetest, nicest, and most overly talented person I've had the pleasure to work with in ages.  LOVE EVERYTHING ABOUT HER.  If you live in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area and are in need of a photog of any sort, (she does families!  and couples!  and anyone else!) check her out.

For Holly

My friend Holly sent Claire this hilarious onesie oh-so-long ago.  She has politely needled me for the past seven months for a photo and I'm finally just getting around to posting it.  She's cute, no?  All illiterate and smiley like that - you can't help but be happy.

It's sort of representative of the past seven months really.  I have an enormous list of things to do that aren't vital to survival or day-to-day living so I've been putting them off and hoping, praying, imagining that ONE DAY SOON I will have the time to tackle them.

And then I woke up and Claire was seven months old today.  SEVEN MONTHS OLD.  It suddenly became obvious to me that there are things that I've been meaning to do, but haven't done for more than half a year. 

I'm not saying that I'll start tackling projects with renewed gusto or anything KUHRAAAAAZY like that, but I would like to start thinking about it more...One day I'd like to know what it feels like to get things done again.

It would appear that I'm not raising a foodie

I'm really good at following directions.  In fact, I LIKE being given directions of the tried and true variety.  It's much better than trying to wing it on my own and figure stuff out the hard way.

So when the AAP said to breastfeed my child for 6 months, I did.  I gave her a few bites of cereal between 5 and 6 months (mostly because I was bored and wanted a new "let's see what the baby does with THIS" moment).  She wasn't too into those bites so I didn't push it.  "She's not ready," I thought.

At 6 months I hauled out my Cuisinart and hit up the Expensive Organic Produce Store. Not because I think organic produce is that much better but because the stuff at Wal-Mart sort of uggs me out (high-quality produce is not their strong suit) and I wanted to feed my daughter pretty food that didn't look like it had been pawed over by rodents.

I lovingly peeled a varied selection of gorgeous fruits and vegetables, steamed them, whizzed them into delightfully colorful purees and froze them in ice cube trays in single serve portions.  I stored them in clearly labeled Ziploc bags in the freezer with things like "Made by MOMMY!"  and big loopy hearts doodled on them because I am cheesy like that.  I taste-tested each one and they were pretty darn good. 

Claire proceeded not to eat any of it.  She fake-choked and coughed dramatically if I put so much as a droplet into her mouth on the sneak while she was looking at a toy.

**COUGH, COUGH, ACK, ACK. I AM CHOOOOOOKING MOMMY**

I've tried it a hundred different ways.  I fed her vegetables first, so that she wouldn't get used to sweet fruits and refuse veggies later.  I've fed her fruits first because they're sweet and she's supposed to love them.  I've fed her after I nurse her and before I nurse her.  Mornings, mid-day and evenings.  Warm food, cold food.  I feed her, Chris feeds her, my mom feeds her, her care providers feed her.  (Well, more accurately, we all ATTEMPT to feed her.) 

Food in pieces that she can feed herself, food on my finger for her to eat off of.  I've thinned it out to a liquid and kept it really thick and chunky with lots of texture.  Food on different spoons in different amounts alternately sneaked into her gaping maw and then given to her the exactly four times she opened her mouth willingly in a "Yes, I'd like that" sort of way.

And still, after all of that, Claire pretty much could care less about eating real food.  The only thing that she will reliably light up for is a hunk of banana in one of these contraptions.  (Memo to Claire:  You cannot subsist solely on bananas.  You're going to have to add something else to the mix.)  And cereal?  Forget about it.  She won't touch that stuff with a ten foot pole.

She's going to be 7 months old next week, I figure she ought to be more into this.  Right?  RIGHT?

I'm not worried -- she is gaining weight at a good rate and is an obviously happy kid - but at the same time it would be nice if Claire started to eat the same kinds of things that we eat.  More than anything I'm simply curious to know what her deal is.  I have followed every iteration of instruction and direction I can find online and...nothing.

Food is good.  There are things out there that are really yummy.  I don't get why she's not more into this.  She is exploring everything else as quickly as she can soak it up, but food?  She could care less about lowly food.

I have wondered if she is more of a "let me feed myself" kid and maybe she's just holding out till her motor skills improve enough to grab things on her own?  Or is she more of a "spicy and interesting flavors" kid?  Does she want something with salsa?

(I kid.  I will not be giving her a bowl of salsa any time soon.)

We'll keep trying.  I'll keep offering.  Eventually it will click.

One day she will eat a cheeseburger for the first time and I will wonder what happened to my sweet baby.  My sweet, darling, chubby-cheeked child who used to only need me for everything in her whole world.

 

Please gaze upon Claire refusing to eat avocado but happy to smush it all over her face and outfit.

PS - Thanks for all the funky glasses thoughts!  I am TOTALLY going to get some.  Not those exact ones I think, but maybe.  Still shopping.