Skip to main content

Gerber Baby Willow is in full bloom (what a mess!)

I recall talking to my close friend Rob about babies when Willow was a newborn.
Rob has two of his own, including one who had her first birthday in September. During our conversation, Rob was cast in the support role; he was leveling with me about the reality of having a newborn as opposed to the romantic notions I had at the time.
You see, Newborn Willow wasn't doing much other than sleeping, and I told Rob that, expecting him to say, "Oh, sleep today, play tomorrow!"
Instead he said with a chuckle, "The Gerber baby doesn't arrive until she's 6 or 7 months old."
And so I waited, and I continued to carry along my romantic notions of the Gerber baby.
As time passed, I began to wonder if the visions were too dreamy. It's the same for all first-time parents, I suspect, harboring Hollywood dreaminess of what having a baby is going to be like. Take, for example, the eagerness first-timers have about taking baby home a day or two after birth then realizing the hospital staff just planted your weary-eyed selves outside the door with a quick "Good luck!" (I had never been more tired in my life than on that drive home).
But seven months later, I am none the worse for the wear (I'm way better than the wear, actually, but I've always wanted to use that idiom) and happy to report that Gerber baby is in full bloom.
And she's everything I've dreamed of. And more.
She's happy and playful almost all of the time. She sleeps soundly. She cries little. She laughs all the time. She makes glowing faces. And she hams at the camera.
She's perfect.
But I have to report she's not 100 percent the Gerber baby I expected.
I have to report this for other first-time parents who are basing their dreams off the Gerber commercials. The commercials surely don't show what actually happens when Gerber babies eat Gerber food. (Now that I think of it, do they actually show Gerber babies eating Gerber food?)
Willow has been eating solids for a few months now, and the first few months weren't that messy. The food kept mostly to the mouth region.
That was really Pre-Gerber Willow, I've come to learn.
Gerber Willow is a mess.
I've known that Willow is going to make a mess with her food, but I've expected that to come when she starts feeding herself.
Pre-Gerber Willow used to open her mouth for the spoon, take the food and swallow. Little mess. But Gerber Willow sometimes grabs the spoon or sometimes sticks her hand into her mouth to feel the food. Sometimes she spits the food out. Sometimes she smears the food across the highchair tray. Sometimes she uses her super-baby secret-attack mode to grab the bowl out of Daddy's hands and spill the food before running her hands through the food.
My favorite, though I have no idea how she does it, is when she plasters the food into her hair and eyebrows (I've never witnessed her putting the food there, but I have to clean it up later; must be her ninja-like baby speed that she uses when snatching eyeglasses and necklaces).
Gerber Willow is a master of diversion. "Look, Daddy, look what I'm doing with this hand over here!" And I look while she uses the other hand to do God knows what. Maybe that explains how the food ends up in her eyebrows. I know that's how she grabs my glasses.
Despite the food-time messes, I'm sticking to my earlier statement: Gerber Willow is perfect. I don't know, it seems as if all the Gerber cuteness that comes with Gerber Baby makes the mess that much more bearable.
And some days I think the mess is just part of the Gerberness. Cute even.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Adding a splash to the winter gray

Willow, Mommy and I went to the Y's pool on Sunday to take advantage of our membership and to do something summery in this dreary and cold weather. We had so much fun swimming and splashing, Willow and I went back on Tuesday. On Sunday, surprisingly, nobody else was at the pool, and the lifeguard seemed resigned to having to sit boringly in her stand. I have no problem with having an entire pool and a lifeguard all to myself, but, again, I was surprised nobody else was there, except for a few exercisers coming and going to use the steam room and the sauna (and a couple of guys hopped in the whirlpool for a few minutes). When Willow and I went on Tuesday, several people were in the pool, but they quickly scattered when the tot and I entered the pool. Maybe their time in the pool had come to a planned end. Maybe they didn't want to be in the water with someone who might pee or poop at any moment. After the initial scattering a couple of men came into the pool area and swam qui...

Among chaos, peace

I want to show you two pictures, but a little later. First I want to introduce you to chaos (or at least what I consider to be chaos) via a handy, dandy list: I am sitting at a laptop, pounding out a blog's letters as quickly as I can think of them. The laptop is only three months old, yet some of the keys stick sometimes. These sticky keys are the ghostly reminders that a toddler's sticky fingers have been pounding on them. Four loads of laundry lie in various states of "unfinish." One load is wet. One load is wrinkling. Two loads await their spins. A fifth load already has been tucked away in drawers, cabinets and closets (then untucked by a toddler then tucked again by me). Cups, plates and bowls hang for dear life to a hastily stacked pile of dirty dishes in the sink while a clean set of dishes sits in the dishwasher. A pile of pictures and postcards blanket the floor beside the desk in the guest room. This was the work of the sticky fingers that pounded on...

Summer zips on by

I guess it's official. This morning, we witnessed the kiddos hopping on school buses and heading to school. That marks the end of summer, I suppose, and the end of summer seems to come a little earlier every year (even though the actual warmness of the weather keeps creeping later and later; are we going to have winter this year, anyone?). Call me silly, but I like to think of the end of summer as that day on the calendar that falls in the middle of September, after my birthday (my birthday, Sept. 16, is in summer, but it has never, ever felt that way even though I know it's always hot on my birthday). This marks my 39th summer if you count that first one I was born during in 1974, and I'm sure many of them seemed really long or really short depending on how old I was. For me, it seemed like the summers of my childhood lasted FOREVER. Now it seems like they zip by. In a flash. Especially this one. It's been a busy one, filled with lots of travels, family visits and...