baby wayne

Hello dear readers. We are all very excited to report that Otis has made some small steps towards independent eating since our last entry. Otis has expanded his repertoire and is now enthusiastically licking nutella, cheese spread, pear, dates and vegemite on toast.

Of course he is yet to properly ingest any of these foods, beyond the miniscule amounts that get on his tongue. Mammalian evolution wouldn’t have progressed very far if our ancestors were merely equipped to lick those foods they hunted and gathered, but Otis may yet be the first baby to prove that it is possible to survive on spreads alone. We know that something is going in by the changes in what is coming out the other end.

On reading the above list of foods you have probably baulked, as I do every day when I offer him these things, but be assured that we have tried many tricks to get something with actual nutrients into him. Having spent so long avoiding foods, Otis is very skilled at spotting them long range; even those pureed vegetables cleverly hidden under cheese spread don’t make it past his super honed senses. If it helps, our paediatrician informs us that babies need fats for their brain development. Not sure where the sugar and preservatives fit in though.

We are hopeful that this new foray into ingestion will mean that actual eating is not too far away. Otis is definitely more interested and more insistent about the food that we are eating although his attempts to feed us whole unpeeled mandarins are not always desirable.

Otis recently underwent a fairly traumatic blood test to determine his iron levels which are, amazingly, ok. He is still to put on any weight over the last four months, so we hope that this beginning will see him a little bigger and a little heavier.

A number of people have commented to me how strange it is, that two people who love to cook, and eat food could be the parents of a person who goes to great lengths to avoid it. I concluded a little while ago that Otis’ aversion to food is my karma, punishment for once scoffing under my breath at a mother who was feeding her children hot chips and coke at the football. Now of course I would be over the moon if Otis were to eat hot chips and coke. Perhaps this is the grand lesson of parenting; you make all kinds of plans and have all kinds of ideas about how things will be, only to have them turned on their head by a little person who most definitely has his own ideas about how things will be. Of course, we won’t be letting Otis survive solely on spreads once he is actually chewing, but it will do for now.