Spoon!!!!!!!!

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a successful docking! After reading extensively about giving JJ solids, I anticipated a HUGE struggle with the spoon. Everything is plastered with big warnings to "not get discouraged" and "be patient" and "try again in a few weeks." So we went in armed for bear. Talk about anti-climatic! I tipped the first spoonful of rice gruel up to JJs lips and he slurped it down like a champ. There was no "crying at the unfamiliar sensation" - there was only crying that we ran out of cereal! Then there was crying about the gas later, but that's not the spoon's fault.

Bad mommy...

Ugh. After successfully getting the little jelly bean off to lala land at 8:30 and myself to sleep by 10:30, he woke up SCREAMING at midnight. And not the, gosh-I'm-hungry-please-take-off-your-shirt variety. Oh no. This was the what-have-you-done-to-me-I'm-dying variety. John and I muzzily try to figure out what's wrong - change the diaper? check, burped? check, no hot spikes poking him anywhere? check. I try to feed him as usual and he just wails like this is the cause of all his heartache. John walks him around to calm him while I frantically google what it might be. Could it be the rice cereal?

Well, while the rice cereal probably did give him some wicked gas (which is what it turned out to be by the way), we apparently screwed up giving it to him in the bottle. Now, that's totally unrelated to the extremely stressful (and if you've never had an infant screaming at you in the middle of the night while you try to get your sleep-deprived brain to figure out what's wrong without breaking down crying yourself, you do not know what stressful is) screaming baby incident. According to what I read, giving the baby rice cereal in a bottle is *bad*! Why? Because they don't know the difference between milk and milk+cereal, they end up eating more than they should, forming bad habits which cause them to be obese in later life. Oh, and it also messes up their little digestive systems since you bypass the reflex that keeps them from eating solids until their tummy is ready. I am not making this up. So now I feel even worse than before because I didn't do my homework and find this out before I doomed my child to a life as a fat tub o' lard. Ok, not really, but I still feel bad. Why don't people tell you this stuff???