Goin' bananas

Now that we've introduced bananas to darling C., I can safely say she must have liked the avocados--at leat she swallowed them, which is more than I can say for this monkey food. At first she thought they were great fun to play with, even if they tasted kind of funky.

But when I got serious about her actually eating and swallowing some banana, she got a little worried. She was happy to take mouthsful of it, but she would promptly spit it out onto her bib when she got tired of rolling it around in her mouth.
Tonight we added a little brown rice cereal to the mix, and it must have tasted as bad as it smelled, even with the banana addition. Again, she didn't mind taking it in, but it came back out right away. Nevertheless, food apparently makes a terrific fingerpainting medium. We managed to get some laughs out of her when we stopped trying to spoonfeed her and just let her have an experience.
I did think briefly of showing her the horrifying pictures of food my friend Charles sent us from Taiwan this morning (duck tongues and deep-fried crickets) to remind her how lucky she is that we are giving her fruits and yummy stuff instead of bugs and the leftover bits of animals. But my printer broke, so I just told her about it.

Here is our family portrait. I call it "Family Portrait with Banana" and am sure it will be hanging in the DIA (Detroit Institute of Arts) shortly.

While we were waiting for the timer to go off, Clementine ripped chunks off both our bananas at the same time, double fisting and trying to shove them both in her mouth. Ah, it just makes a mother proud to know her daughter follows in her footsteps. Can't wait until we take on chocolate chip cookies.

She is stirring in the other room and Nate is sounding like he's losing his patience. On the one hand, I understand. There have been moments I have wanted to throw her out the window for crying all night for no reason. But I think he takes it personally sometimes, and that bugs me. Hypocritical, yes, but still a real feeling. I dug into a new book about sleep this evening, and I'm feeling very optomistic. Nate is taking this sleep-deprivation much worse than I have been, so I'm hoping it will bring him some sleep and comfort as well.