The Battle of the High-Chair

The Geej and I are having "issues." Food issues, to be more specific. She is driving me NUTS with her eating peculiarities, and I've started to get really mad at her, which is stupid since she's 11 mos. old and i'm an adult. But still...

Here's the deal: She was eating like a pro. Every type of baby food I gave her, she enjoyed and ate enthusiastically. Then we moved to "stage 3" foods with chunks, and I started giving her finger foods--the kind of stuff you can pick up and eat without choking even if you've got tiny fingers and only 5 teeth in your head. And she got very good at feeding herself really quickly. It was amazing, to be honest. (Of course, I was there cheering her on like a lunatic, yelling "Hole in one!" and clapping when she'd actually manage to get the slimy piece of banana or slippery piece of avocado into her mouth.) But for about the past 5 days or so, she's simply boycotting every thing she once liked. What do I mean by "boycotting" you ask? Well, we sit down, I put a piece of sweet potato in front of her, and she looks right at me and throws it on the floor. She used to do this when she was done eating, as if to say, "Hey, I'm full. See? Let me show you...the cantaloupe is now on the floor. Get it?" But now, she does it at the BEGINNING of every dining session, and with every thing I'm trying to feed her. I tell her "No!"each time, and I've instituted a "5 strikes and your out" policy whereby once the 5th piece of food hits the floor, we're done. It saves us both a lot of frustration, but the downside is, SHE'S NOT EATING!! Granted, she's still drinking formula, so she's getting nourishment, but she's nearly a year old and should be getting about half of that nourshment from food, not formula. God, I hope this is a phase. It's so ridiculous how wonked out it makes me. I guess because meal time used to be fun for both of us. Now, I just dread it, and one of us usually ends up crying.

She's also simultaneously entered in to a severe hair-pulling phase and a crying-like-its-the-end-of-the-world-whenever-she-gets-her-diaper-or-clothes-changed phase. But hopefully, these too shall pass.

Now some of the great stuff she's doing:

• Trying like hell to stand up on her own.
• "Dancing" to music, which is WAY cute. It started out innocently enough with "Row, row, row your boat," but now she's into New Wave and the blues.
• Waving to the cats whenever she sees them.
• Going to bed at 8:00 - 8:30 instead of 9:00 - 9:30.
• Swimming! We went to the pool for the first time yesterday, and she liked it a lot. Probably because it was so warm it felt like bathwater, but man, did she ever look cute in her swimsuit and sun hat...

[By the way, the "mood swings" part of this whole menopause crap has set in big time. I cried at least 3 times yesterday, for no real reason. And let's just say my fuse is a lot shorter now that it once was. It takes very little to really, really piss me off. (See the previous paragraph about The Geej's eating habits, for instance.) I'm supposed to go back and see my doctor again in a few weeks, and I'm hoping there's some kind of medication out there that can make me sane again, because between the exhaustion caused by the insomnia and night sweats and the mood swings, Karla May isn't much fun to be around these days.]