Gag Me With a...Pea

When Ryan was four months old, we started giving him "solid" food. I have to put the word solid in quotation marks because the stuff we gave him could only be defined as solid in the absolute loosest sense of the word. Baby rice cereal, applesauce, pureed pears, and mashed sweet potatoes are more liquid than solid. But they've got more to them then watery formula, so "solid" it is.

And over the past two months, we've been working our way up to foods that are a little closer to the true definition of solid. We've been mixing the rice cereal and oatmeal thicker and thicker each time. We've recently experimented with Stage 2 foods that are a bit less finely pureed and have some texture to them.  We have a couple of little mesh feeder bags that we've given him with ice cubes or chunks of melon to suck on and to gnaw on a little. And in just the past couple of days we've tried teething biscuits. The initial reaction to the teething biscuits was less than stellar: Ryan gnawed happily for a bit until a few crumbs came off in his mouth, then he made a very strange face and made the "hairball" noise (anyone who's ever had a cat will recognize that sound). He did NOT like that texture in his mouth one bit. But the ultimate food rejection so far was last night when Daddy gave him a mashed up pea.

Never have you seen such elaborate gagging faces as his reaction to said pea. You'd think we'd forced him to eat a cockroach or raw octopus. I guess the sweetness of the nice fresh pea was lost in the unpleasant (to him) mouth feel.

So I guess we're back to smoother foods for a while yet. But we'll keep trying new things. Who knows, maybe it'll be something like cockroach or raw octopus that appeals to him.