Baby's First Meal

Baby’s First Meal

It was time for baby’s first meal. This was very exciting for me. I wasn’t the one who fed either of my boys their first meal. My wife was. I don’t even think I was home when it happened. I was sure going to be here when my little girl had her first meal.

I know how that sounds, she four months old and I’m just now getting around to feeding her for the first time! What kind of monster am I? No. No. No. She’s been sucking back milk like a piglet for months.

Today however would be different. I was very excited but I’d also been putting it off. You can start feeding babies food (baby food of course not fried chicken) as young as four months. We have been having cereal though it isn’t much fun. At six months you can feed them fruit and vegetable puree. Its real food not watered down white slop


Recently she has been licking her chops every time she sees me eat. The other day we were in a sandwich place. Nothing fancy, they sell sandwiches and smoothies and what not. We sat down after ordering. When the sandwiches came I pulled out a cucumber slice to chomp on. Baby started licking her chops. It looks like she is pantomiming eating. Her lips go up and down a lot and she drools.

When I didn’t give her the cucumber slice she absolutely flipped out. I mean she started screaming like a maniac. So I took her to the car. (I wasn’t going to keep her in the shop. I always hate it when parents let there children cry loudly inside stores and restaurants. It’s great they have a parenting method that involves their baby ruining other people’s shopping but come on take the brat outside. You don’t need to ruin my lunch.)

I fed her a bottle. She stopped crying long enough to drink it. Afterwards she presumed to begin screaming and crying again. I swear she was still mad I didn’t give her the darn cucumber slice.


Another time a few days later I was making pasta for dinner. (Yeah I make it. If my wife does it the stuff turns to mush. Just like when she makes risotto it is always soggy. Don’t know why. It just is. Like the time she made bacon. She said it took me to long to make it my way so she would do it. What she served looked and tasted more like charcoal than bacon. She’s never asked to make bacon since.)


So anyway, I made dinner and set baby down to play while we ate. She flipped out. So I brought her to the kitchen and she sat in my lap while we ate dinner. She was licking her chops and chomping away on invisible food the whole time.


I had another similar experience before it occurred to me that she was ready to eat real food. Yeah, I’m kind of dense sometimes. So I checked out our copy of What to Expect When Your Expecting. It doesn’t say much about baby’s first year mostly because the authors want you to buy What to Expect the Fist Year. That book ends abruptly so that you need to buy a copy of What to expect the Toddler Years. The authors should wonder what to expect if they meet me since I’m irate at how much money they conned my wife out of.

We received a copy of each of them when she got pregnant the first time. When my son was three I was cleaning to make space. I saw these books and figured, “Hey, he’s three we don’t need these.” So I tossed them. A year later she was pregnant again. We dutifully expended the money to pick up a set of them again. About a year and a half ago I was cleaning again. (I should have put it off a couple weeks like I put everything else off.) I came across the books and said to myself, “Nah won’t happen” and tossed them. And about two weeks later she gave me the blessed news. So you can imagine what I did. These books ain’t going anywhere.


It was time to feed baby. I had learned the hard way about vegetables and carrots. The eldest son had mashed nannas for his first meal. He absolutely loved them. He wouldn’t eat anything else. Well that is not quite true. He liked apples, and pears, and sweet potatoes. Green beans. Nope. Those came right out. So with my second son she started him on vegetables. He didn’t care. If you put it in front of him he’d eat it. He’s was like a little garbage disposal.


I got her ready by putting her in her swing. She fits it better than she does her high chair. It is a little to big for her. We were going to have peas. It is a mashed green slurry that tastes more or less like smashed peas. (Yeah, I tried it. I wanted to know whether her slop was any good. It wasn’t.)




She was surprisingly cooperative for her first meal. Anyway she gobbled this slop down. She even grabbed my hand to pull the spoon into her mouth faster, and to far, causing her to cough and sputter. The second time she did this she didn’t choke herself. It was quite amusing.


After some spoonfuls of goop she had managed to make quite a mess of her face, and I made a mess of her head. We had a blast.
I can say it ended up in her hair. But that was my fault not hers.





Afterwards, she drank her bottle and took a bath. We played for a little bit. Then I put her down for her nap. It was all sort of anticlimactic but I’m still happy to have been a part of it.