Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Day 185 - Rice Is Nice

This past Sunday, we started the kids on solid food. When I think of solid food, I imagine a thick piece of steak or a dense slice of cheesecake (that's what Emma imagines too). Yet what we were told to start the kids on was a small helping of wet, slimy rice cereal (Emma was very disappointed).

Lisa was very excited to start the kids on solids. So much so that she wanted to be in charge of preparing their food. For those of you who know Lisa, she is a very good baker. Pretty much anything she sticks in the oven tastes really good. But in regards to her skills as an actual cook who can prepare meals on the stovetop...well...err...umm...did I mention she makes great cookies?

When I first started to date Lisa, she prepared a dinner of chicken curry for me. Pretty tasty right? Well when she started cooking, she put in the chicken, onions, potatoes, carrots, and celery in all at the same time. After a very long period of simmering, everything except the chicken disappeared in the pan. The potatoes and vegetables melted and created this curry cake in the pan. After scooping curry on my plate of rice, the curry just stood there like frozen chocolate pudding. Did I mention dessert was really tasty though?

But back to the rice cereal. Our pediatrician told us to feed them rice cereal twice a day, and an hour after feeding them the bottle or booby. An hour after their morning feeding, Lisa went to work at preparing their rice cereal. We bought these nice little suction cup bowls and feeding spoons at The Right Start on Saturday, so we were ready to go.

Andrew was up first. At first the spoon was this weird, foreign, shaft-like object being shoved into his mouth with difficulty; I think Andrew is straight. It took awhile to get the food into his mouth because he kept on pushing it off the spoon with his tongue. So Lisa tried pouring the rice cereal into his mouth, and then inserted the spoon into his mouth. This helped a bit, and Andrew began to get a hang of it.

Next up was Emma. When I stirred the bowl of rice cereal, I observed that there was hardly any texture to the food at all. It just looked like formula to me. But Lisa reminded me that our doctor told us to have the consistency very wet at first, and then slowly thicken it up over the next week. As I fed Emma, she had the same reaction as Andrew. She did not enjoy having this weird long object shoved into her mouth; I think Emma is a lesbian. But I copied Lisa's strategy of pouring food and then introducing the spoon. And that helped a bit.

I suppose it was a fairly successful first feed. They didn't really eat much at all, but the first day is more about the experience than the actual food. As Lisa and I cleaned up, I poured the rice cereal into the sink. Again I commented on how thin the rice cereal was. Lisa told me to stop griping about it. She told me she followed the instructions: 1 tablespoon of rice cereal to 3 ounces of formula. I told her that seemed like an awful lot of liquid for a little bit of rice. By this time Lisa was frustrated with me and wanted me to shuddup. She grabbed the instructions and read it line by line to me.

"Look! It says 1 tablespoon of rice cereal to 3 tablespoons of formula!" she commanded to me.

"But you said you put in 3 ounces of formula," I responded.

"I did...err..oh. Whoopsies! I put in too much formula! Haha."

Sadly, Lisa did not bake anything that night so the kids think she's a sucky cook.


"I know I'm suppose to like rice, but this is ridiculous."


"BRING ON THE RIBS!!!"

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