How I ruin the best part of my day.

The truth about feeding my baby solid food?

It's really fun. 

I honestly have no idea whether this is a typical experience for moms, but it's a total party around here.

My baby is generally pretty cheerful and smiley, but something about eating baby food gets her downright animated. She stares at a bite of food with the cutest little cross-eyed expression. She makes faces when she tries a new food. She's fascinated by the spoon and she even tries to feed herself with it.

There's really only one thing that can ruin this whole experience...

Impatience.

I guess it's pretty obvious that a mother should always strive to be patient with her offspring, but sometimes the challenge of getting a bite of food into my daughter's mouth during the split-second she parts her lips two centimeters just does not feel productive. Sometimes I look wistfully at my to-do list and think about all the things I could be doing in the forty-five minutes it takes my baby to eat half a teaspoon of peas.

Having a go-go-go nature might be helpful with older kids, but it's no fun with a baby. She treats my attempts to rush her with a blank expression that seems to say, "What? Schedule? Time? What is this madness?"

And let's be honest. She's kind of right. All the stuff I want to "get done" is nothing in comparison to seeing my baby's little carrot-stained grin.

(By the way, before I had a baby, I never thought it was cute for babies to be covered in food. And I still don't think it's all that cute on other kids. But there's something about my own baby being splattered in peas and carrots that is just squeal-worthy. I can't explain it.)

Since I feel like I always need to be doing something (and nourishing my child doesn't count as "something"? Yeah, I don't understand it), I'll often put on a podcast while I'm feeding her. It gives me something to focus my attention on so I don't mind as much if my baby insists on holding the spoon with her little death grip.

If I actually remind myself to relax and breathe and ignore my to-do list for five minutes (or an hour, as the case may be), feeding my baby solid food is actually the best part of my day.