I got the pepperoni and caramelized onion with rosemary sauce and mozzarella, natch. Also I grabbed the #18: mozzarella, rosemary sauce, baby spinach, artichoke hearts, and sweet potatoes. Exciting and yummy!

Late getting home, I ran in and found Siena and Thalia almost done with their decidedly non-pizza dinners.

Siena looked up at me and said, “Daddy!”

Thalia looked up at me and said, I jest not, “Da da.”

Hooray!

Now if we can just make that a conscious habit, I’m all set.

So far she’s been eating Cheerios, Kix, peas, grapes cut into twelve pieces, green beans chopped into 6+ pieces, and diced peaches. Carbs? Big thumbs up. Veggies? That’s going to require some work.

The other huge benefit (aside from very dirty sleeves), is that we can give her a pile of O’s and walk away and deal with something else. Something else usually means Siena. Or getting our own dinner ready. This has made Tuesday evenings (when Mama works until after the kids are in bed) a tad bit easier to manage; I can actually get some food of my own now, too.

Today Mama had a continuing education course on dental something-or-other. Due to inclement weather–buckets of rain–we stayed home all day. During Thalia’s two naps I vacuumed water out of our basement and read to Siena. Daylight savings started today, so Siena got up at the delightfully late time of 6:45 AM, but she didn’t go to bed until almost 9 PM. We actually got Siena reasonably well adjusted, she had lunch at 11:45 instead of an hour later, and we had dinner right around 6:30, which is our normal time. (Thalia is less easy to manipulate in terms of timing, so she will take a little longer to adjust.)

Ah, dinner. We went out to Firefly’s tonight. We were low on our home supply of the Dixie Kiss sauce, which always makes for a good excuse to go get some of the best BBQ in the Metrowest. Thalia had not napped much during the day, so she fell asleep in the car on the way there.

Siena asked for her own drink, a “Strawberry Breeze.” This is actually the name of the drink the had last weekend at Ruby Tuesday’s. Apparently it was so tasty it left quite the impression on her! We ordered instead a strawberry lemonade, which arrived in a massive mason jar. All three of us took turns drinking from it; had Siena drunk all that on her own she’d be up all night. And even though it wasn’t technically the Strawberry Breeze, it was still a success with Siena. Thalia woke up, so Mama fed her while Siena and I walked around, waiting for our food to arrive.

The next success came with the hush puppies. We had not tried this appetizer before, but it sounded good. Each deep-fried ball of bliss did have some onions and jalapenos, so I got Siena some baby corn from the condiment bar. However, the pups were mild enough and Siena was interested enough that we gave her some. She loved them! Success number two. She even liked the outside parts the best, and I later explained to her that the outside parts were the “toasty bits” (which she normally hates on anything), and she said, “The toasty bits were good!”

Dinner for Mama and Siena was pulled chicken with honey-glazed carrots and sweet potato fries (two new sides and both rated delicious). Siena ate mostly cornbread, carrots, and fries. I had ribs and pulled pork along with mashed potatoes and the yummy sweet-potato pecan pudding, all also very tasty. Though she ended up not liking it, Siena even tried one of the ribs.

Thalia never really blew up, though Mama and I did have to stagger our eating windows in order to walk her around a bit. It’s worth noting that walking around a 6-8 month old baby with a full head of hair sure does make you popular with the wait staff of restaurants, and the hair provides a natural subject of discussion to mitigate any awkwardness of talking with totally random strangers.

Back home, to bath, and finally, bed. And another vacuum session in the basement.

After she devoured her second drumstick, Siena said, “I want another drumstick please.” Mama was upstairs tending to Thalia at this point, so if was left to me.

Daddy: Siena, how many legs do you have?

Siena: One, two.

Daddy: And how many hind legs does Tenzing have?

Siena (looking around for Tenzing): One, two!

Daddy: How many hind legs does Nalia have?

Siena: Two

Daddy: How many legs does a chicken have?

Siena: Two!

Daddy: Well, drumsticks are chicken legs, and you ate two of them already, which means there are no more drumsticks.

Siena: No they’re not.

Daddy: Yes they are.

Siena: No they’re not. (this could go on a while…)

Daddy: Actually, they are. And you ate both, so there are no more.

Siena (moving one of the drumsticks from her plate into her salad bowl): Now’s there one!

Daddy: You still ate two.

Siena (moving the other): Now there’s none!

Daddy: Siena, there are no more drumsticks. Chickens have two legs, and you got the two drumsticks.

At this point, Siena got upset and petulantly said, “I’m going to go tell Mama that you said there were no more drumsticks.” I responded as she tromped up the stairs, “You do that, Siena.”

I then hear this exchange from upstairs:

Siena: Mama! Daddy said there were no more drumsticks!

Mama: Well, chickens only have two legs.

I shout up after them, “That’s what I said!”

The troubles with the right hand started early. Every bite of food we gave her would be accompanied by her stuffing her pudgy little fist in her mouth, often with a portion of her bib thrown in for good measure. We couldn’t figure out why she’d want a finger or two in her mouth whenever she was getting food. Her hand would get filthy, her clothes frequently ruined, and she’d get very low throughput of food into mouth. This would make her very unhappy and fussy, leading to abbreviated meals and thrown-away food.

I observed in one feeding a few weeks back that she was doing more than stuffing her hand in her mouth. She would put her right hand on the tray, sweep her fingers on the tray (as if you were sweeping up some crumbs towards you with the tips of your fingers), and then after that move her hand up to her mouth. At one meal she did this for every spoonful I gave her. The only explanation I could come up with was that she was mimicking what she’s seen the rest of us do, going through the motions of picking up food off her plate (let’s just say, we struggled mightily some meals to get Siena to use her utensils). This process was complicated by the fact that depending on how she analyzed cause and effect, it might have seemed to her that whenever her hand went into her mouth, she got food, even when these two were concurrently if not causally related. After that, I have held back the spoon from her mouth whenever her hand starts motioning towards it in an attempt to disassociate the concept of food from hand. But still we faced the battle nightly of trying to jam food into her before she’d have a melt-down, all the while working around that darned fist.

The very smart teachers at day care just gave her a toy to occupy her right hand, and have had very little trouble feeding her.

Now in this week, she seems to have realized that the hand only gets in the way. Maybe the right synapses have fused, maybe she’s just too hungry to let the hand be a deterrent to food flow. Regardless, she can get through almost an entire meal with both hands down at her sides and just opening and closing that little mouth to take in whatever food we can stuff in there. We call it the baby bird stage, as it’s just open and close, open and close, more more more of whatever we can give her.

Well, more of whatever except for peas. She can’t stand those.

Here were the fortunes:

• Thalia: “A chance meeting with someone from the past is in store.”
• Siena: “There is no secret to success except hard work.”
• Daddy: “The expert at anything was once a beginner.”
• Mama: “To lower your stress level, get a cat.”

To which we wondered, Thalia doesn’t have that much of a past, nor that many chances to run into people. And also, sure the stress levels are high, but do we really need another cat?

Siena astutely remarked, “Thalia is too young to eat her cookie [anyone could easily see where those little brain-wheels are headed], so I get to eat hers.”

Afterwards, I expected a better, and more reliable, fortune, would be, “You will soon experience a brief surge of hyperactivity.”

I have a disposition towards poor memory, so I worry I’ll forget even more things as the girls get older, so this blog is probably more for me than anyone else. Now, if only I had more time to write and more interesting ideas to record. Pictures and videos turn out to be pretty easy because they require little thought compared to a miniature essay, which is probably why I haven’t really written a decent one of those in a while. That is another part of the multi-layered curse of being child #2, sorry kiddo. In the mean time, we’ll keep plugging away with the solids (first night tonight for pears for the munchkin, and she did all right) and everything else.

And to preserve some balance, here is an entirely unrelated shot of Thalia sleeping in my arms:

So, I would bring the half muffin over to Siena and say, “Here’s your muffin.” She would eat it, and then ask, “Please may I have another muffin, please.”

In this manner, she’d get a whole muffin and think she was having two.

Well, that all ended today.

Today, after eating the “first muffin,” she asked, “Please may I have the other half of my muffin, please.”

The powers of observation of strong in this one.