I like to ite...

Zachary has watched with increasing interest over the past few weeks when mommy and daddy are sitting/standing at the table eating, so we decided that this morning (for posterity, that's at 172 days of age) it was time to try his first solid food. Well, 'solid' isn't really an accurate term when you puree a banana to about a step beyond a smoothie, but you get the idea.

As with everything else about raising a baby, the advice comes fast, furious, and completely contradictory when talking about first foods. Some say to start with rice cereal, since it's easy to digest and is a pretty smooth transition when started as basically breast milk with bits o' rice in it. Others say that's lame and was only used because when they tried to feed newborn infants, that was one of the few things that wouldn't cause them digestive distress. Yet others say you should start right in with the core foods that you eat.

We decided to bypass the whole first argument by starting with the aforementioned banana, which seems to be almost universally okayed as a first food. (Though there's another argument that if you start with fruits, the kids will never eat veggies. Jeez, people!) We get a nice bunch of organic bananas in our bi-weekly fruit/veggie order, so 1/2 banana went into the Cuisinart, and a few tablespoons of banana puree came out a few minutes later.

Zachary also got to try out his new high chair for the first time, which already seems in some ways a little cramped for him, but I'm hoping once he's fully upright it will be all good. As to the banana, he seemed to like it, though lately he's all giggly when you tickle his tongue with your finger, so maybe he didn't even notice there was banana paste on our fingers. Still, everything we offered seemed to go down (though some of it came back up later in the morning), even if 'everything' comprised maybe a teaspoon of what we'd blended.

Hooray for Zachary's first culinary introduction! Next up, what do folks think of a lovely blending of peanuts, shellfish, kiwi, honey, whole grain, lactose, and maybe some MSG, caffeine, and taurine, just to spice things up a bit?