fuel

It might be time to start thinking about giving June solids.

When we were at her pediatrician's last week, she told me to start looking for cues that June might be ready for rice cereal. Do her eyes follow objects from your plate to mouth? Does she root while watching you eat? Has she tried to grab food from you?

As of last week, the answer was largely "no." Yes, she has shown increased interest in watching me eat, but it ends there.

Until yesterday.

June, perched in her exersaucer, stared in peckish fascination, and rooted, as I ate (wait for it) a peanut butter-and-Dorito sandwich.

Spinach salad? Yawn. Chicken breast and brown rice? Booooring. An apple? I'll stick with the liquid stuff. But arguably the most laughably nutritionally bereft thing I could be stuffing into my pie hole has her captivated. Captivated!

That's my daughter, all right.

Now, I'm a reasonably healthy person, but when I say I have been taking that "breastfeeding burns an additional 500 calories a day" factoid (I hate that word) to the bank, that's no puffery.

And they're 500 empty calories, believe that. The sandwich was a snack.

So I was a little crestfallen to see that June reserved her big admission of readiness for a disgusting sandwich I invented when I was 13. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's disgusting in a stoner's delight sort of way, but it's not something I imagined wrapping up with love and and a handwritten note and sending off with her in her lunchbox. That note would read something like, "Dear June, I love you so much. Mind the corners of the Doritos because the peanut butter is like spackle and these things are wont to lodge in your throat and cause some minor esophageal tearing. I am a cautionary tale. Kisses! -Mom."

I say a little prayer of thanks every time I swallow one of my CVS brand prenatal/lactating vitamins because there have been some questionable meals I've passed on to this poor girl. Mounds of pasta with sodium-heavy jarred sauce. Generic Tombstone frozen pizzas. Ice cream. That's it, just ice cream for dinner. Poor thing ingested that for the first 12 weeks of her zygotic life. The midwife had me convinced that wasn't such a bad thing for a newly pregnant woman. Her words? "It's better than potato chips." I didn't have the heart to confess that's what I had eaten for breakfast.

Entire days would go by where the only green thing I ate was a Mike & Ike.

Greg said something yesterday about getting excited for out CSA to begin. For those who don't know, CSA, or community supported agriculture, is a sort of farm cooperative where one buys a "share" in a local farm and in turn get a basket of fresh produce every week. Our landlord, Steve, runs a thriving and well respected organic farm called Blue Ox. We, naturally, subscribed to his CSA and the veggies started rolling in around mid-April.

Those first boxes were a mani-chromatic sight for winterized eyes. Flushed-pink radishes, verdant chard, peppery baby arugula, piquant scallions -- just thinking about it makes me want to barf.

You see, these shipments coincided with some beefy morning sickness so my memories of the veggies are of excitement, then reticence, then hauling arse to the bathroom. To this day I can't look at a radish without seeing post-traumatic memory flashes of our toilet lid.

It didn't end with vegetables. The morning of my birthday Greg made me bacon and eggs. The smell of frying bacon, normally the sweetest of perfumes, prompted me to barf. Five minutes later I was eating that bacon.

Meh.

I didn't really have the cliched pickle-and-ice-cream cravings (well, the pickle part) you hear about in pregnancy. More than anything, I had strong aversions. Mostly to green vegetables. And chicken. Unless it was fried or ground, I couldn't go near the stuff.

But I did ramp up the sugar consumption. At around five months, I went to the dentist, per recommendations for pregnant women. The dentist, also five months pregnant, told me she would be calling out numbers for the hygienist as she looked at my teeth. Ones and twos? All is good. Threes and fours? A cavity or similar. Pretty soon after beginning she wasn't calling out numbers. It was her defeatedly rattling off, "Same. Same. Same. Same. Same." A mouth full of fours. Ouch.

But I did some good. Notably, the night I went into labor. Greg and I were out to dinner and I was eyeing fried chicken and french fries on the menu. At 39-and-a-half weeks pregnant, what's a little trans fat? Something inside of me, likely my daughter descending into the birth canal, guided me toward shrimp scampi with steamed vegetables and brown rice. Energy food, I thought. It ought to do me some good. As I shoved the last forkful in my face, I had the first crampy trace of a contraction.

A little concerned about June's interest in my bread-bound abomination, I sat her on my lap today and slowly paraded a carrot through her field of vision. Back, forth, back, forth, and finally to my mouth, June's giant blue unblinking eyes were locked on it until it was chewed and out of sight. Her little tongue slowly emerged from her mouth. Victory, I thought, and hugged my little girl.

To celebrate, I ate a Dorito.