chowing down on dust

Mr. Jude hit a major milestone yesterday. As noted in the previous post, the little guy is starting to get teeth. Add that to the fact that he's been staring at us eating our food (and grabbed for mom's ice cream cone yesterday) led us to believe it was time for... solid food.

Now I always thought you made the leap straight from milk to mashed peas. But no, there is this odd intermediate step of "rice cereal". It's this powder that you mix up with some fresh milk, and serve to the baby. It starts off with a consistency somewhere between soup and milkshake.

rice cereal box; package is really overdesigned for what it is

Jude was a good sport; he took a few spoonfuls and actually swallowed. There was a bit of overflow down the chin, but not nearly so bad as you might expect. Granted, it will be a while before he leaves milk behind and is on to all solids, but it was a nice start.

So I was very curious about what this stuff was. Before seeing it in the house I had guessed it would be something like oatmeal. No, not at all. It's this fine white powder (not a good description... usually that means cocaine or anthrax) and, being the adventurous dad that I am I tried some--without milk--to see what he's tasting.

Ash. Dust. Powdered melamine. I don't know what its supposed to taste like, but that's all I came up with. How did anyone determine that this was a good thing for infants to eat? Ugh. I promised Jude that the next time he had to eat it I'd mix it up with some beef broth instead of milk (good thing he doesn't understand English, because Kara's going to make me break that promise).

Well, at least it's ostensibly nutritious. I'll have to introduce him to yummy food a little while down the road.