As any parent can attest, trying to feed an 11-month-old baby is about as futile as trying to thread a needle with a cat while standing up in a roller coaster driven by Lindsay Lohan after a long weekend of partying as you go through the loop and into the corkscrew (of the rollercoaster, not Lindsay).
CheeriNoNos – Because Baby Won’t Eat It Unless He’s Not Allowed To Put It In His Mouth.
While I’m trying to feed my own 11-month-old son I usually talk out loud partially to entertain the the little guy for a moment or two but mostly to mask his screams of protest as I try to convince the baby that mushed carrots have another purpose other than finger paint. My conversation usually runs like this:
“Okay, good baby! Let’s put you in the high chair. Ow, that’s my hair. No, this leg goes down here. No, here. Why are you screaming? Stop. It’s just a chair. Put your leg here. Okay, here, that leg goes here. How many legs do you have? Where’s your arm? Where are my glasses? Ow, that’s my hair again. Okay, you’re in good enough. Here, try some carrots. You don’t want them? Woah, stop swinging your arms. No, this is a spoon with carrots. They’re good for you. They’re… on the floor. Okay, that was fun, right? Here, you want to feed yourself? Have a spoon. No, that’s the wrong end. That’s the other wrong end. No, that’s your nose. Here, want some carrots? I don’t even know where those went. What’s in your hair? Here, have another spoon. Okay, here’s another one. One more. Okay, forget the spoon. Put your hands back in the carrots. Where’d your bib go? Here’s the doggy! Yes, that’s the doggy. Yes, the doggy is licking the wall again. That’s where your carrots went. Do you want some… Okay, okay, stop screaming. Here, have an animal cracker….”
And then all is well. I throw away the baby food jar and tell my wife what a good eater the baby was. When she asks me where all the animal crackers went I just say I was hungry.
Our baby son, being our own little Baby Einstein, has quickly put together that being strapped into a high chair means he’s about to have globs of pureed meat and vegetables rammed down his throat for the next 20 minutes until my wife and I collectively decide that 1) We both need a good stiff drink and 2) baby has had enough to “eat” where the word “eat” means flung all over the room and smeared so much in his hair that he looks like a little light haired Squiggy. Instead of just giving in and letting us shovel in little piles of mush and oatmeal, our baby son quickly turns to screams and howls of protest which make us wonder if his high chair is padded with broken glass or at the very minimum is attached to a live car battery with rusty alligator clips.
By the end of each meal our dining room looks like someone set off a charge of dynamite in a farmer’s market.
This would be frustrating enough if it weren’t compounded by the fact that at the exact moment we free Baby Coffee from the confines of the dreaded high chair he immediately returns to smiles and giggles and burps and babbling. And the second we put him on the floor he crawls around the room grabbing everything he can and, here’s the ironic part, puts it all in his mouth and tries to eat it.
My son is crawling around my office and pulling himself up on various pieces of furniture as I write this. In the past three minutes he has tried to put the following into his mouth: my mouse, my keyboard, a stapler, the dog, his hands, both cats, a pen, my shoe, my leg, a dog treat, my keys, his foot, his shoe, a pair of headphones, the baby monitor, an electrical cord and the bill for the mortgage. I let him have the last one.
By watching this behavior I’ve learned several things:
1. My son is probably not going to be a very picky eater.
2. Baby food companies are really missing out on a big opportunity here.
Instead of packaging baby food in little jars or making baby treats in simple shapes like stars and circles and cute little animals, baby food should be made to resemble things that are dangerous and should not, under any circumstances, be touched by a baby! I’m thinking we could have Cheerios shaped like knives, animal crackers shaped like car keys and cookies fashioned to look like TV remotes.
Mushy foods could be freeze-dried or just frozen in much the same way. You’d have strained carrots in the shape of daddy’s cell phone, blended fruit medley in the shape of mommy’s earrings and pureed turkey and potato dinner that looks like dog poo (not really much of a stretch with that one). Of course I’ll have to give them a cute name like “CheeriNoNos” and have a clever ad campaign featuring the voice of Antonio Banderas because, well, that’s pretty much all he does now.
To make sure your baby gets enough to eat, you just scatter these dangerous looking CheeriNoNo snacks around the house in places you can’t imagine your baby can possibly get to. Under the bed, behind the toilet, and on top of ceiling fans are all excellent places to put this baby food because those are some of the places he’ll look first for Things To Put In His Mouth.
I hope this helps some of you fellow parents out there who are trying to get your babies to eat. There’s no need to thank me. I get all the reward I need knowing there’s a toddler out there who hasn’t eaten strained peas in weeks, but will soon be happily munching away on an animal cracker shaped like a jailhouse shiv.
It just brings a smile to my face…
6 Responses to “How To Feed A Baby”
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Karen Vogel says:
You are onto something there. If you want them to eat something, you just have to leave it on the floor and say, “No!” My husband and I always figured it was the foraging instinct that made them crawl around the house and hunt for things to put in their mouths. Now our youngest refuses juice (I always wean them to juice), but she will drink her bathwater (which I’m sure has pee in it, in addition to the bubble bath) with gay abandon. Chlorinated pool water is yummy, too.
September 6th, 2007 at 8:47 am -
Paul says:
Another Gem Tom!
Our very own little hoover at the CaffiNation Lair is all about pretzel sticks. crackers are alright but you’d think we were giving him a sound thrashing when we try to feed him Chicken Noodle Diner, which by the by tastes nothing like chicken, noodles or remotely resembles dinner.
In the past 24 hours we have had to remove video game controllers, remotes, the slow cat, A grill spatula, a coaxial cable, and my laptop from the kids grasp either right before they ended up in his mouth or directly after.Let me know when the Glock 9 Graham crackers come out -
Dave says:
I am so glad my kids are past that stage. It takes a good sense of humor to find anything humorous in feeding a toddler.
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anenglishmum says:
Thanks so much – for the memories and the laugh! I still have pureed food on my ceiling, and my youngest is four. I guess that says more about my husbands decorating skills than anything else…
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jv says:
WOW! What an hilarious post! You have a great site here. My wife found it and sent me the links.
I maintain my own blog, 90% about the hobby of sports memorabilia and 20% about being a father…(never was good with fractions.)
I hope you don’t mind but I’m linking to you from my site. I have quite a few readers that are parents and I think they would benefit from posts such as these.
Thanks for a good read and I’ll be back daily…
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Tom Coffee says:
Heh, thanks. Now if I could only update this site weekly I’d be set…