We've started giving Leah vegetables.
No... no, that's not right.
We've started pushing spoonfuls of rainbow puree into her mouth.
It's quickly become clear to me why so many children hate vegetables: It's because as children, their parents, in one form or another, at some point before the poor little memory began, spent an insurmountable amount of time and energy forcing unspiced vegetable goo down their throats. Preference? Pfffft. Babies don't have preferences! Give them ALL the vegetables! Give them pureed carrots, pees, squash, sweet potatoes, hell, give them spinach! Give them beets! Introduce your baby to flavor!
Except the fatal flaw in this logic is that some vegetables, with no butter or salt or pepper or spice or anything added to them, do in fact still taste like the dirt they were grown in.
In an effort to earn back some of the Hippie Karma we lost when we decided to use disposable diapers and formula, Dan and I are making our own baby food. (Also, it's about a gazllion times cheaper to steam and puree a bunch of Farmer's Market carrots than it is to buy the jars in the store.) This is mostly a good idea, except that I'm now sitting on a bunch of pea puree that I can't justify giving to my child because she cries every time I attempt to feed her the accursed bright green goop.
But wasting is no good, and I'm certainly not going to eat it, so this week I decided to get creative. On Wednesday evening, I prepared oatmeal (adored by child) and carrots (tolerated by child) and a a couple tablespoons of the detested green peas. I fed her two spoonfuls of oatmeal, for which she opened up her mouth like a hungry baby bird.
Then I blitzed her trusting face with a spoonful of mixed carrots and peas.
Results were mixed. On the one hand, she ate all of the oatmeal and about 3/4 of the pea-carrot mixture. On the other hand, by the time we were finished, the look on her face clearly implied that I had just declared a dinnertime war that may continue for years to come.
I've given her a break and introduced sweet potatoes, which may outrank the oatmeal as Most Favorite Food Ever. Squash is next on the list, but it occurs to me that maybe we ought to introduce a different color before she starts turning orange.
