Last week I officially got the okay from the doctor to start solid foods. I didn’t tell him that we’ve already reached that hurdle, a mom always knows when even if Daddy fights it. I was ready for this moment. My freezer had banana and avocado purees waiting to be defrosted and served. I had the bowls and spoons washed, all the bibs ready to grab, and the high chair and walker ready to go for “nom time”. I wasn’t prepared for all the milestones that would hit me at once.

His feedings go better than the textbook says. He eats, but he decided that was boring. He needs to be entertained and what’s more entertaining than realizing that those raspberries he loves to blow makes all the food fly everywhere. He took his spoon, and place it in his mouth, and would blow raspberries until the spoon was empty then would cry wanting more. Since most of it was still getting in his mouth at least, I let him continue this game. The joke was on him when he blew cereal right into his eyes. While it startled him, he laughed and laughed and thought it was so great he wanted to flick cereal into my eyes. Joke was on me, that was funnier.

In making his food (not the rice cereal though I do have that ability with my Baby Bullet blender), I learned quite quickly that I save a fortune. To put this into perspective: one little jar = $1.05 for the “good brands”. For about $1.69 I spent on a sweet potato, I filled up 9 baby bullet servings of food. With the bullet servings being double the size of those little jars, I estimated I’d need about 18 jars for the same amount of food. That total equals about $18.90, versus the $1.69 for my sweet potato and it packs more vitamins, less preservatives, and from what I remember, tastes a lot better. The moral of the story? If you have the ability to make the baby food, do it. It’s cheaper if nothing else, and healthier at the risk of sounding like a hippie.

That wasn’t the only thing to happen in this week time frame.

I would say “I don’t mean to brag”, but every parent is proud of every achievement their child does whether it’s big or small. My scrawny little peanut of a baby impressed the doctor by being “developmentally advanced”, but worried him by being a skinny little guy. He’s not little though; he’s a tall bugger. He’s just his father’s son: taller and skinny with a flat skinny butt and even has the hairline my husband thinks he has. He’s hit milestones months ahead of him, and that made me happy thinking that maybe he’d wait a little and stop growing fast. Not my kid though, he’s his brother’s brother. He never slows down, and never misses a beat.

He has quickly learned that his rolling that he mastered a while ago is much more efficient than his attempts at crawling. To prove his point, he quickly rolls across the room until he reaches whatever destination he decides he want, which I quickly learned is the one that makes me run after him saying “baby come back!”. I think my chasing after him is more amusing to him than the action of rolling away from me. My oldest son was an early crawler and an early walker. The faster they learned to move meant they would always stay the closest to the action. Now it seems I blink and he’s across the room. I wasn’t ready for this, but like everything else with children, you adjust real quick.

Babies grow quickly without warning. They learn from every little movement you allow them to do. With freedom on the floor, my son learned that he could quickly move across it. Now with Boppy, he learned that sitting up and “playing catch” with a little football is more fun than anything else. You can’t blink because you might miss everything. Then before you can even believe it, they’re almost in middle school and full of independence. All you can hope is that you did everything the best you could.