Mush

Trystan started on solid foods about a week ago. By "solid" I really
mean slightly thicker than the mommy milk he's been used to. You know,
baby mush.

In the grand tradition of disappointing babies with their first tastes
of real food, we chose baby oatmeal to start. If you've never had the
opportunity to taste baby oatmeal, well, you're lucky. It tastes (and
looks) a lot like powdered cardboard. Except for Trystan's, which I've
been mixing with mommy milk, so it tastes pretty much the same as what
he's used to getting from a bottle (or the source), except pastier.
Many folks choose to start babies on rice cereal rather than oatmeal,
which looks and tastes exactly the same as oatmeal but tends to
constipate them. It's no wonder babies spend their first couple of
months at the dinner table spitting their food out.

Tonight (or sometime this week), we're going to move to the next step:
vegetables. We're not cruel enough to jump straight to green beans and
peas (although properly prepared, peas can be quite tasty). Charlotte
got sweet potatoes as her first veggie, so Trystan will too. With
Charlotte, we used a variety of jars and homemade baby foods. Well, and
some non-baby foods like applesauce. I never understood baby
applesauce-you pay a small fortune for a tiny jar with the word "baby"
on it, when you can walk a couple of aisles over in the grocery store
and find natural applesauce made with just apples and water, and get a
large jar for just a couple of bucks. I digress. This time, I'm going
to attempt to make more of the baby food myself. I don't believe that
it will be a huge undertaking. I already have sweet potatoes, a
butternut squash, and a bag of organic carrots sitting in the fridge
awaiting their turn in the steamer. I'm planning to steam, roast/bake,
or nuke the veggies, and then puree them and then freeze in ice cube
trays. Last time I relied more on mashing up whatever we were having
for dinner (if it was baby-appropriate), and used jars of food for
everything else. If anyone has any advice here, please pass it on!

We've already waited longer than with Charlotte to start foods,
preferring to wait till after this last surgery. I'm not, however,
going to throw a large quantity of solids his way just yet, since he has
another surgery coming up (getting rid of the colostomy! Hurray!) And,
unlike a normal baby who would just start making stinkier diapers,
Trystan is still filling colostomy pouches with his solid wastes..and
the size pouch he's been using is getting a little small. If we weren't
about a month from getting rid of the things altogether, we'd probably
try to move up to a larger kid size rather than the newborn ones we've
had, but the larger ones are a LOT larger and we still have a couple of
weeks of supplies of the other kind to go through.

Well, to take this discussion back to where I started (and away from the
discussion of where it all ends), I believe that tonight's dinner menu
includes mashed sweet potatoes (with pork chops for those of us with
teeth). I hope he enjoys it more than his oatmeal!