Baby Einstein

Since the little girls got over their illnesses, they have decided that they loooove any and all food I might happen to feed them. Even Katherine, once the baby who would eat nothing but mandarin oranges, has changed her stance on the matter. In the last two weeks, I've offered them chicken, broccoli, lima beans, green beans, blueberries, cauliflower, and hummus (homemade sesame-free), and they have scarfed every last bite down and howled for more.

They are each eating roughly a half-cup of food at a sitting, twice a day, and nursing roughly five times. We're being especially aggressive with Claire, who shrank down to 12 lb 12 oz while sick, but who has recovered nicely. I took them for a weight check on Friday, and Katherine was 15 lbs 2 oz, while Claire weighed 13 lb 10 oz. For eight-plus months, this is REALLY tiny, and she's still well into the pink under the 3% growth curve. On the bright side, this is a gain of about a pound in a month, and the doctor pronounced herself pleased and said to keep it up.

They are still super-messy eaters, and they are discovering that food is fun to play with. They will spit it out of their mouths to examine it, and snatch it off the spoon as it's going in. Both babies are also fascinated with the blue food bowl -- seriously, they get all excited when I take it out of the cabinet -- and grab for it every chance they get.

I usually feed them together, alternating bites so that nobody cries for MORE FOOD NOW. The other day, I went to put a bite in Katherine's mouth, and brought the bowl just a little too close to Claire. While the baby has the quickness of a striking cobra, her little hands are tiny. She couldn't possibly have grabbed more than a tablespoon of peaches-and-rice-cereal. However, you would not believe what a tablespoon of peaches-and-cereal looks like when it's been flung all over Mama, Sister, and the dog on the floor below.

I choose to believe that she is performing science experiments, and that she has formulated Claire's First Law of Baby Physics:

Messes are always bigger than the sum of their ingredients.