"Free Inside! One Jagged Metal Krusty-O!"

The twins’ latest milestone is eating solids. At least, their new food is as solid as a little rice cereal mixed with a lot of formula gets, which is to say still pretty liquid. It’s kind of like eating a steaming bowl of beef broth for supper in that I can’t imagine it’s the most texturally satisfying experience. I suppose that when your life’s biggest mealtime variety is switching from Alimentum to Nutramigen, adding a little rice cereal can be pretty exciting.

For any non-breeders who accidentally stumbled across this blog, infant rice cereal is a dried flake-like food made from, I presume, rice. It dissolves easily in liquid, slowly thickening it to the consistency of paste if you add enough cereal. It should not be confused with adult rice cereals like Rice Krispies, Puffed Rice, or Puffed Krispies as the infant version is easily digested by young tummies, and the various snaps, crackles, and pops of the adult version could frighten very small children. Plus no one who could choose a different food would ever agree to eat infant rice cereal.

We gave them their first serving of rice cereal a week shy of their six-month-birthday. We originally planned to wait until they were six-months, but I guess we were bored last night with only having to struggle to make one child eat solids. The information I’ve seen says children should wait until at least four-months before eating solids, but preferably six-months. The reasoning is that children who start solids too young increase their risk of developing food allergies. Figuring the boys already showed a cow’s milk allergy, we didn’t want to see them acquire any more food allergies since our family already has enough picky eaters at mealtime.

I prepared their meal according to the “Baby’s First Feeding” directions on the side of the box. They called for five parts formula to one part cereal, which creates a mixture thinner than the Kansas City Royals fan base. I poured the mix into separate bowls and stirred it with separate spoons because I wouldn’t want our little men who share bedding and probably pacifiers to swap germs.

We placed them in high chairs after supper, with Ellie feeding Ian and me feeding Tory. Spoon-feeding before the child recognizes the spoon is a matter of depositing food in the mouth, waiting for the oblivious child to realize that he now has food in his mouth, and watching him swallow. When an inexperienced child swallows, the food moves in a random direction with an equal chance of going down the throat or the chin.

The boys seemed to get the hang of it as we progressed, with definitely less than half of the initial amount ending up on the bib. Ian was pretty fussy by the time he finished his ounce of food, but Tory was ready for more when I scraped the bottom of the bowl. While Ian finished with a bottle, I prepared another ounce for Tory, this time a little thicker. He sucked that down a little less greedily with a little more squirting onto the bib. He then finished with a little bottle.

I’d consider it a fairly successful feeding. By the end, they’d even started opening their mouths a little as the spoon approached in anticipation. Now I just need to figure out how to spoon-feed both of them by myself while keeping Abbie placated, and this feeding thing will be easy.