New Foods

Rachel has been into shoving everything she can get her hands on into her mouth. This means that she has also been trying things at a more rapid pace than I would perhaps choose.

On Saturday she tried a dill pickle. Grandma (Karen) gave it to her. At first I was sad that we didn't have our camera because I didn't want to miss her first "pickle face." As it turns out, however, she doesn't have a pickle face, so I didn't miss it. She loved the pickle and sucked all the juice out of it and still wanted to suck on it when it was taken away. She didn't pucker her lips or anything.

She also tried red pepper for the first time on Saturday. She snatched a piece right off of my plate during lunch and started chowing down on it--she even bit right through it so I had to scoop a chunk out of her mouth to keep her from choking.

Sunday followed the same trend. Rachel and I had a very long day. We went visiting teaching at 10 AM and then had to be at the 2nd ward at 11 AM. After sitting through an hour of sacrament meeting, opening exercises, junior primary, and half of senior primary, Rachel was just about at her wits ends. Sister Bennett suggested that we visit the nursery for a while, so we did. We arrived just in time for snack time. The leaders were very accommodating and set an extra place at the table right away, complete with place mat and a little cup of water.

The snack was raisins and little cheddar whale crackers. The minute the leader put the crackers down in front of Rachel her little hand shot out and snatched one up. Before I could stop her she had popped it into her mouth and started sucking on it. My initial reaction was to force it back out of her mouth but she seemed to be handling it okay so I let her keep it.

Then she tried to swallow. Before I knew it she had silent tears streaming down her face, which was quickly turning bright red. I flipped her over on my lap and started pounding on her back and after three or four swift blows she covered me with spit up and the whale went flying across the room.

I spent the remainder of snack time biting off tiny pieces of whale to feed to Rachel and trying to keep the raisins out of her reach, while simultaneously keeping seven overly-helpful children from shoving whole crackers or raisins down her throat.

At long last snack time was over and we started the lesson. We learned about the sun and the moon and then colored a picture of the sky. Rachel was much more interested in eating the crayon than she was in actually coloring any silly picture of a sun or moon.

Sunday dinner couldn't come any sooner for me. After an hour of visiting teaching, five hours of church, and an hour of home teaching I was wiped! I didn't have any energy to make dinner so we were very lucky that Andrew's parents had invited us over or we would have been eating PB&J! We had dinner at the Gillespie's and got to see Richard and Diana's little Michael. Rachel, again, enjoyed some red pepper and some fresh red anjou pear slices.

I thought today would be a little less adventurous since we were at home all day, but I was wrong.

Rachel was in the kitchen with me while I was cleaning up and was kind enough to point out to me that it has been far too long since I've swept the floor. I heard her smacking her lips so looked down at her. She had found a little piece of cake that had fallen on the floor and was happily sucking away at it. I think it was a piece of the failed cake layer that we have all crumbled up in a Tupperware container sitting on our counter. At least, I hope that's what it was.

The last interesting thing Rachel tried this week was a handful of macaroni and cheese. She can be so fast and sneaky when she wants to be. It's a wonder she can't get Cheerios into her mouth 100% of the time, although I will grant you that she grabbed a whole handful of noodles and only got a few in her mouth. The rest she smeared all over her face.

It makes me wonder how much non-food she eats in a given day. I know she eats a lot of paper, but I wonder what else gets into her system.

At least dinner was controlled. Rice cereal and Cheerios. She's increasingly uninterested in this combination. She gets so excited when we all assemble at the kitchen table and then I put a Cheerio in her mouth and you can just see the disappointment spread across her face,

"They're having Cheerios again...what else can I find around here?"