Darwin would have asked me not to reproduce...

Eating. It's one of lif'e's many keys to survival. And I suspect knowing how to feed one's offspring is also crucial to the survival of any species. We had a cat once, Buttons, who was too stupid to figure out how to keep her litter alive. I'm starting to realize I have a lot more in common with Buttons than I'd like to admit.

When my daughter turned four-months old, I began my journey down the long, winding and perilous path of feeding her solids. I couldn't help but wonder at my cluelessness when it came to knowing what, how, and when to feed my daughter. Breast-feeding seemed intuitive, excepting, of course, the incident when my Lactation Consultant told me my six-week old daughter's near-constant desire to eat was "abnormal" and that I wasn't "doing things right." But I put Mina on a three-hour feeding schedule, and all seemed right with the world. Enter the chaos of solids.

The directions for preparing rice cereal are at once overly simplistic and moderately confusing. They give you specific directions for preparing the cereal for "baby's first feeding" (1 tbsp cereal to 4-5 tbsp milk/formula), but then direct you, for later feedings, to add the "desired" amount of cereal and milk to a bowl and serve. Um, what? If this were a box of cocoa puffs, I could see giving such vague directions, but I thought of this stuff as more like cream of wheat, which has very specific guidelines for preparing a successful batch. Too much or too little liquid, and you end up with an unpalatable mess. Then I got to wondering if maybe my evolutionary instincts never kicked in. I mean, if people needed more specific directions for preparing this cereal, then I'm sure Gerber would have included them on the box. Maybe I'm the weak link here.

So, two months later, I've experimented (and flushed a lot of cereal down the drain) and finally seem to have a pretty good handle on the cereal. Two tbsp rice cereal to two ounces formula/milk, and Mina's usually a pretty happy camper. Since she was about five months old, she's been getting that twice a day and has seemed to do well with sleeping through the night and being pretty satisfied overall. But now that she's six-months old and has entered what her pediatrician deems as the appropriate time to introduce other solids, I'm at a loss, once again.

I guess what's most frustrating is that I've done my research. Perhaps, I've done too much research. I bounce from website to website, book to book, and mother to mother trying to figure out how much my daughter should be eating. One source says I should think of solid foods as more like "little tastes" for my daughter -- like snacks that introduce her to the plethora of flavors in our culinary palette rather than anything offering substantial nourishment. Then I read on another site that she should be eating 4-8 tbsp of cereal, 2-4 tbsp of veggies, 2-4 tbsp of fruit, and 4-6 oz. of juice on top of 24-30 ounces of breast milk every day! The pediatrician isn't much help either. According to her, Mina should be getting a breakfast, lunch, and dinner of solids (on top of breast milk). And maybe some juice. And maybe some snacks. And maybe something small before she goes to bed. So...how much should she be getting again?

I understand babies are not machines and this is why they don't come with user manuals, but I would expect some general consistency about how much they should be eating at any given age. We have guidelines for adults, but apparently not so much for babies. What's more is when I ask my friends about this, they all give me this look that says maybe Congress ought to think more seriously about licensing people to have kids. And maybe they're right. I don't hear other mothers asking these questions; they just seem to know intuitively how to feed their kids.

At any rate, the point of this blog is to chronicle the adventures of me and my husband as we try to raise our daughter: feeding her, clothing her, teaching her how to survive in a world where people like me are allowed to reproduce...despite what Darwin said about survival of the fittest.