Mmmm....rice cereal....

At Benny's 4 month appointment two weeks ago, the doctor told us we could start him on rice cereal.

I was ecstatic.

Not that I don't love breastfeeding, because I do. Especially now that he's bigger - 14 pounds - I've discovered the joy of lying down on the bed and just relaxing, reading as he nurses. (I didn't feel comfortable doing that when he was much smaller, and I never sleep now when he does it.)

Speaking of his size, I'm still working on my defensive mama bear reaction whenever someone comments "Oh, he's so small! So tiny! What is he, just a few months? FOUR months? Wow!" and then proceeds to bloviate about how their child approached the size of a small farm animal at 4 months, was able to leap tall buildings in a single bound at 6 months, and as a toddler is preparing to enter the Olympics next year as a gymnast.

It's annoying.

But like I said, I'm working on it. {**breathes in, breathes out....**}

So back to the cereal. I bought cute little Gerber rubber-headed spoons and small little plastic bowls, and Gerber's DHA enriched rice cereal. We also bought a Bumbo, which is a brilliant invention that helps infants not quite yet able to sit up on their own to do so while also strengthening their muscles to prepare to do it on their own. It's sort of like training wheels for sitting. We also got the tray that attaches to the Bumbo. So it's like a mini high chair. He loves it.

Mind you, while infants are born knowing instinctually how to suck, they do not know how to eat from a spoon. They have to learn. This is a messy process.

Very messy.

Especially since Ben likes to smile constantly, especially when I'm right there in front of him. Which means that instead of chewing or swallowing the stuff, he often just sits there and grins at me as it runs down his face in a puddle of drooly gruel. We saturated enough paper towels the first few times to kill several trees. I'd say that 80% of it ended up on his face.

Now we have about a 50% ingestion rate. I can see him chewing, and I can also see the looks on his face as it registers that he's actually tasting it. He doesn't seem all that thrilled about it. My mom told me that it goes down better if it's warm, so I make sure to nuke it for 10 seconds or so and that does help it go down better. She also taught me the very effective trick of washing it down with a bottle between spoonfuls. This works wonders for getting him to swallow his "gruel", as David likes to call it because a character in Austen's Emma is very fond of gruel. (For those of you just tuning in, David is a bit of an Austen groupie and belongs to several online and real-life communities of Janeites.)

The beauty of this is that I can still breastfeed him, and I plan to for at least the next several months if not for his first year. But I can start to do it less often now. I am no longer his sole source of nourishment, and this is a huge relief. To say nothing of the physical discomfort, which subsided after the first agonizing few months but never really went away entirely, I will be immensely glad to not feel quite as much like a dairy farm.