hell hath no fury like a baby whose food is "all gone"

Well, things are settling down around here.  Esther has been sleeping less during the day and more at night; Tim was feeling well enough this morning to go into work (although he still has a nasty cough and a sore throat); and I actually managed to run a load of dishes and a load of laundry this afternoon!  Maybe I'll be able to function as a stay-at-home mom after all!

One of my goals upon returning to the U.S. was to get Esther on a more nutritious diet.  In China, I figured as long as I filled her tummy at the right times, it wouldn't matter if she missed a few nutrients for two weeks.  (We did give her some table food, which she really liked, but with our erratic schedule and frequent changes of location, it was hard to consistently supplement her bottles of formula and rice cereal.)  Esther's referral information had included the line, "When she sees food, she wants to eat."  We decided in China that it should have read, "When she sees food, she cries until you give it to her"!  It took until the end of our stay there before she could anticipate a bottle without crying about it.  Now she usually doesn't cry, but she leans forward, tense with suspense, and pants hungrily until the nipple is in her mouth.  Then when the contents of the bottle are gone, she cries.  At first she cried a lot, but now it's more cursory, and occasionally she won't cry at all.  I think she's finally decided that she can trust us to feed her again when she gets hungry again!  Anyway, since we've been back in the U.S., I've been trying to give her solid foods during the day and only give her bottles at night.  So on Saturday I introduced a number of solid foods.  Let me tell you, this child truly likes to eat!  At one point I was feeding her a mashed banana.  I remembered hearing that bananas can cause constipation, so I only mashed half of it, and I didn't have anything else handy to feed her when the banana ran out.  Well, when she swallowed the last bite and realized there wasn't anymore, she was outraged!  She threw back her head, arched her back, and shrieked in fury.  It took some doing to get her calmed down.  Later, she threw the same performance over a jar of baby food.  (Now I've gotten smarter and always have Cheerios handy to pop in her mouth when she finishes something else.)  Her grand eating total for Saturday was: two jars of baby food, half a banana, a little more than one egg steamed with milk, a bottle of rice cereal, two small bottles of diluted juice, and an unknown amount of stars (aka Gerber graduates "puffs").  Not too shabby for a fourteen-pound child!  Perhaps not suprisingly, she went on to produce something like eight dirty diapers in 24 hours.  Now that her initial eating orgy is over she's consuming food less extravagantly.  She's taken to eating a few bites eagerly and then bursting into tears.  But if I give her a few Cheerios she'll then happily go back to her original food.  Strange child.  She continues to be really sensitive to other people eating.  If I sit on the floor near her to eat, she'll not only watch me intensely the whole time, but try to climb up me so she can get into my bowl.  At least she's stopped crying every time I eat!

I may have written earlier that instead of sticking things into her mouth to check them out, she'll stick out her tongue and lick them.  This is still mostly true, but she's unfortunately discovered the uses of teeth.  This morning she chewed the tag off a toy, and then shortly afterwards chewed the tag off one of our suitcases.  I thought I had gotten all of it out of her mouth, but when Tim was playing with her a little while later he discovered that she still had some pulpy paper stored up in the roof of her mouth.  Oops.  I've caught her trying to chew other things apart on several occasions today, so I'll have to pay close attention to what she tries to put in her mouth!

Linette