Bananas

Any parent can get caught up in a cycle of worrying over their child's growth and development.  

Being the kind of person prone to levels of anxiety that rivals every Richard Pryor character ever filmed, I'm beginning to notice that I go through cycles of getting knotted up over how Ava will be doing in a year instead of focusing on simply doing the next thing, which is how Daddy and I agreed we would raise her.

Let me give you an example of how this gets out of hand:

Ava isn't very hungry one day.  She takes a bit less of her morning bottle than she normally does, then promptly ejects it.  I worry that her stomach isn't digesting quickly enough to keep up with as many calories as she needs. 

 Why can't she eat in the morning without tossing her cookies?  Am I holding her wrong?  Will her stomach get stronger, or is that even the issue?

Later, I attempt to pack Ava's lunch with a heavier caloric punch by stirring butter into her sweet potato mush.  She takes three bites willingly before refusing to eat anything but dissolvable corn puffs, which have the nutritional density of a dirty baseball.  

am  I being a crummy parent by allowing her to enjoy anything but whole food?

I give her a sweet pickle just to keep her chewing, hoping that it will stir her gastric juices enough to wake up her tummy and ramp up a greater demand for nourishment.  She closes her fat fast on it and slurps intently for about thirty seconds, then pitches it onto the carpet below where it becomes a dog hair magnet.  So goes the second hairy pickle.  And the third.  

Good grief, we're going to go broke before we get more food in her than on the floor!  Then she'll always be hungry, and if i can't teach her how to eat, she'll end up all sick and sad like one of those dogs on the #%|£! Sarah McLaughlin ASPCA commercials!

It's evening, and we're all vegetated on the couch, enjoying our first holiday viewing of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.  Without much fanfare or warning, Ava just barfs.  

Oh, this poor child!  How is she ever going to grow?  Her four month old cousin is eating three times as much!  What if she barfs until she's two?  What if she barfs EVERY DAY for the rest of her life?  What if we find out she can't properly digest anything but boiled rice and bananas and then there's a banana blight and all the bananas in the world just DIE, and then all the monkeys in the world who lived on the bananas just DIE, AND THEN AVA WILL NEVER GO TO THE ZOO AND SEE MONKEYS EATING NOTHING BUT BANANAS SO SHE DOESN'T HAVE TO FEEL ALONE IN THIS SCREWED-UP, BANANA-BARE WORLD?!?!?

 (Ava hates bananas, by the way....just like her Mommy. I think they taste like Elmer's Glue and I can't even stand the sound of someone eating one.)

So you see how things can get a little out of hand -- how I can end up in the shower after Ava's bedtime sobbing softly to myself because ALL THE MONKEYS ARE GONNA DIE, I JUST KNOW IT!!!!

And then I dry off, 

And put on my pajamas,

And curl  up in bed next to Daddy,

And fall asleep absolutely exhausted from worrying.

And when I wake up in the morning, there's a perfectly happy, fatty, petite little ten month old reaching for me with her silly-Milly grin on her face that says, "YAYYYYY, IT'S MORNING!  LET'S DO IT ALL AGAIN!"

And somehow, I'll feed myself the reassurance that she'll be just fine.  She'll be hungry sometimes, then barfy sometimes, and happy and grumpy and overexcited at times, and I'll think to myself, Hey, the sun came up in the same place and yet somehow, things are different.  They're okay.

And then I'll handle life just fine.... For awhile.