First food... first cold.

I'm very happy to report that R has begun the process to educate her pallet.. she has started eating rice cereal. For those of you that don't know, rice cereal is essentially rice that has been pulverized to a fine, flat, dust. You mix it with formula and it forms a sort of white paste. In fact, I'm fairly certain that in a bind you could use it as a glue.

Riley was initially a little bit apprehensive about eating anything other than formula. After all, formula has been her sole form of sustenance, and if your lucky enough to have watched her eyes light up as the bottle approaches you'd realize that her pension for formula is nothing less than a hard core addiction (her eyes glaze over, and if for any reason you don't get the bottle to her mouth in short order she will actually start to shake!). Her introduction to rice cereal was also compounded by the fact that it was also her first introduction to a spoon. Luckily, she believes that everything should go into her mouth so getting her to take a spoon full of rice cereal was easy. What wasn't easy, was getting her to keep the rice cereal in her mouth and than swallow it. For most of the first rice meal she would just take the cereal in her mouth, smack her lips a couple of times and than slowly spit it out of her mouth so that it would dribble down her chin. John or I would scrape it off her chin, and then put it back in her mouth... then she would spit it out again. Repeat this cycle for about 20 minutes and that was her first cereal meal.

Although she did manage (by mistake I'm sure) to ingest a little bit of her first cereal, it wasn't until her second attempt that she really understood that this wasn't a game and that this is actually a way for her to eat. Halfway through round two she started swallowing and before we knew it she was begging for more. As you'd expect she still spits up quite a bit of it - I'd guess about half, but she's making progress. She's been at it for a couple of weeks, so relatively soon we'll be adding oatmeal cereal to her diet.

On a not quite so happy note, Riley has her first cold. More specifically she has her first ear infection. It's minor, but all the congestion that's accompanied it has kept her fathers fairly anxious. A couple of our friend's children (that have never met Riley) have had RSV recently, so with that in our minds we've been watching her like a hawk. The doctor prescribed her an antibiotic, and says that we don't have much to worry about. Riley, on the other hand, is basically unfazed by the entire thing. She's her regular, smiley, happy self (with a fairly constant runny nose, and an occasional cough). So - we'll continue watching her like a hawk, and hopefully she'll be 100% healthy in a few days.