We waited pretty late to give Olive any solids. The fact of the matter is that she's happy and thriving on milk, and Christina's enjoying the closeness of breastfeeding, so there hasn't been any urgent need for it. Still, between her recent graduation from the infant high-chair to the sitting one and her increasingly unsubtle hints about her interest in big-person food, Olive's made it clear that it's time, so we're starting her off on fresh fruits and pureed vegetables.

It probably says something about my personality that my favorite food to feed her is orange slices. Her entire face contorts in this emphatic dramatization of the concept of sour: her eyes squint shut, her lips purse, she sometimes does a brief full-body shudder. Given that the vast majority of the meals in her life have been essentially opposite from sour, as far as taste goes, one can hardly blame her.

It probably says something much more flattering about Olive's personality that she really enjoys being fed orange slices. Despite the oddness of the experience and the intensity of her reaction, she can't get enough! She lunges forward and catches the slice in her mouth if you hold it in front of her; she gives a huge, toothless, juicy grin when she finishes a slice; she fusses if she sees that there are more which you're considering taking away. She has encountered something entirely new to her experience, and she really enjoyed it, and I couldn't be prouder of her.

It's not just oranges, though there is a certain constancy of color: Christina spent a few hours last weekend baking, peeling, steaming, and then pureeing a pumpkin, and freezing it into individual baby-food popsicles¹. It contains no ingredients other than pumpkin and water; it's a bit bland to my taste. As Olive's first savory grown-up type food, though, it's a hit. With this as well, there's as yet been none of the dodging and spitting that I've always assumed were an intrinsic part of the baby-feeding experience. Instead, there's this rapid progression from "I'll try that!" to "wow, that's weird" to "give me some more!".

Somehow, despite two-parent feeding strategies, holding her hands gently away, we still end up sort of gently painting her face whenever we feed her a puree. As far as I can tell, this is inevitable. I'm just proud of the fact that it's clear that she eats more than she wears already, and almost none of it ends up in the bib.

This is all still in the earliest stages of weaning. We give her solids in small quantities, once or twice a day, and we pretty much have to hand-feed her because though she'll reliably grab something which you hand her, she's still pretty hit-and-miss at actually getting it into her mouth. Spoons of her own are out of the question, at least until she learns to hold them unlike a microphone. Our idea is to give her a gradually increasing portion of solid food, until hopefully sometime in the next several months she's only breastfeeding at night and getting most of her nutrition from solids.

What does a gradual increase look like? For example, we plan on trying to steam some peppers and carrots in the next week or two to just hand to her and see what she makes of them. I'm kind of expecting her to shake them, note their failure to rattle, and then drop them. Even in the best case, she still has no teeth, so the most she'll really be able to do is sort of gently erode them. Still, it's the sort of thing we want to try: just giving her low-pressure opportunities to eat like a big girl instead of trying to guided-missile spoonfuls of mush down her throat.

Despite the lack of urgency on our part, I wouldn't be surprised if she starts demanding more soon. She's the kind of girl who wants to try everything the world has to give her, and I'd hate to let her down in support of that quest.