Joey's First Food

Dean and I finally admitted to the fact that our baby is growing and is one hungry, hungry hippo. Joey has been showing developmental signs of "food readiness" for the past week or so. He can sit while assisted and hold his neck steady and the biggest sign is that he has started reaching for our food and drooling like a water fountain whenever we are eating. I really thought he was going to get up and walk across the room last night to have a bite of pizza. Seriously, the kid was starving!!!

We had hoped to put off feeding him solids until 6 months. There is no real reason for this, we just thought that sounded about right because that was how old Ben was when he started eating solids. Our doctor told us at Joey's 4 month appointment that it was up to us, but we could feed him whenever we were ready. Well today, a couple days shy of 5 months, we were ready.

The adventure began this morning. Ben and I were making banana nut muffins and Joey was watching Ben mash the bananas with a foot long string of drool hanging from his open mouth. I don't think Joe blinked for about 5 minutes. He wanted that banana. I ended up putting a tiny bit of the mashed banana on my finger and holding it up to Joey's mouth. I swear he licked it voraciously from my fingertip, looked up at me with a huge gummy grin, yelled out with joy, and began banging on his highchair tray as though to demand more. Ben and I both gave him a couple more bites and he was delighted!

This evening we mixed up some rice cereal and breastmilk and Ben fed Joey his first bites of cereal. Joe lapped it up without any hesitation...in fact, by the third bite he decided that Ben and I were too slow and he needed to take matters into his own hand. He attempted to grab the spoon and shovel bites into his own mouth! I even had to thicken up the cereal because it was too thin! I would say this kiddo was ready to eat. He kept sighing and patting his tray as though to tell us "it's about time you ding-dongs realized I was hungry! FEED ME!"

Ben did a great job and we were all impressed with Joey's eating skills. What a big boy!