eating

ever since starting solid food, the bulk of ava's calories have come from grandma's organic veggies. on this visit to thunder bay though, ava got to experience organic veggies in a whole new way : straight out of the garden, dirt and everything!

september is an excellent time to sample northern ontario produce, and ava got fresh samples of tomatoes, watermelon, carrots, squash and corn. ava's favourite item was clearly the cherry tomatoes and she quickly developed a strategy for consuming a tomato without molars. first, she would bite a chunk out of the skin and spit that out. then, she'd pop the tomato in her mouth and squish it around until all the yummy juice was extracted. then, she'd spit the remaining pulp back on the ground. messy . . . but effective.

more pics of ava in the garden.

twelve to fifteen months is a rough patch in baby evolution, because it's the time when conventional wisdom dictates that parents should start taking away many of their favorite little things. this is probably much harder on the parents than the kids because you are supposed to get rid of just about every little trick you've developed to keep them quiet for five minutes. for example, no, ava doesn't really need to lounge in her bouncy chair to drink her bottle, but gosh, wasn't it nice when she was all nice and strapped firmly into place, so she didn't combine bottle drinking with walking practice?

speaking of bottles, the biggest challenge (for everyone as far as i can tell) is transitioning to the sippy cup. a couple of days after ava's first birthday I tried to make her quit the bottle cold turkey. when she got up in the morning, instead of a bottle i handed her the dreaded sippy cup. she screamed hysterically, took the sippy cup and threw it across the room. the scene ended with ava strapped into her bouncy chair, "watching television" while periodically screaming as i dribbled the milk into her mouth sip by painful sip. i opted to abandon this plan in favor of a more graduated approach to the issue. currently, we've reached a bizarre standoff in which she will drink juice from the cup, but not, god forbid, milk.