Monroe's First Vegetable!!

Saturday we reached another exciting baby milestone: Monroe's first solid food!! I had been looking forward to this for quite some time. I couldn't wait to cook Monroe some food... which is kinda funny when you consider that I've been "preparing" all her meals since she was born! Still, there was something exciting to me about making her that first fruit or vegetable!

We began with a trip to the Farmer's Market to look for some in-season fruits and veggies that would make good baby food. As usual, Monroe enjoyed all the sights and sounds of the bustling market.


We grabbed some organic apples and sweet potatoes for later in the week, and we decided that butternut squash from Finley Farms would be Monroe's first food!! The farmer was nice and agreed to take a picture of us with Monroe and her first vegetable.


At home, I cleaned up the squash and gave it to Monroe to play with for a while while, just for fun. She was pretty interested in the new object. Then we put all her future baby food on a roasting pan and slow-roasted it all while we did other things. The aroma of an oven full of butternut squash, sweet potato, and apple was fabulous!


After the squash was pureed and cooled, we were finally ready for the big moment. Or I should say we THOUGHT we were ready--I realized as the first spoonful of squash met with Monroe's strong and curious fingertips that we had FORGOTTEN TO PUT A BIB ON THE CHILD. If that's not a "rookie parent" moment, I don't know what is. Oh well. There's a lot of laundry in this job, I didn't figure a little more would make a big difference, so we just went on with show.

With Monroe in her chair and Mommy and Daddy sitting on either side of her, the meal began. We started off by enthusiastically eating some squash ourselves, just to build the energy. This was easy because it really was quite tasty--I love roasted winter squash when it is in season!



When Monroe started her usual "begging" behavior, we gave her her first spoonful!



We quickly realized that spoon-feeding a brand-new eater is actually a lot messier than simply offering a bit of the food on the tip of your (clean) finger. Monroe doesn't see how big she needs to open her mouth for the spoon, so she ended up pretty much scraping all the squash off onto her cheeks as she slid the spoon into her tight lips. But with a fingertip of food, you can help her out a bit with that. Once she started sucking the food off our fingers she realized what she was tasting and got more excited.

The whole family relaxed at the table for around 15 minutes. Eben and I shared a glass of wine while feeding Monroe and cracking up as the squash spread from her face to her outfit to the table and beyond. When we sensed the fun was coming to an end, Eben ran off to draw a bath and Monroe went straight from her high chair into the tub with daddy while I ran around cleaning the kitchen and treating her laundry. Thank goodness she'll still get 95% of her nourishment from breastmilk in the next few weeks, because I'm not ready to do this production more than once a day!