An 8-month-old's eating habits

Desmond loves food.  Loves it.  He definitely inherited his love of food from the best lover of foods: me.  I'll generally eat anything that's put in front of me (seriously.  One time, in Bhutan, we were guests at this wonderful farmer's house and they made this wonderful dinner.  Because we were guests of honor, they made us the best meal that they could: emadatse (chilis and cheese), fiddleheads, red rice, and pork.  The pork was a huge deal since Bhutanese are Buddhists and don't kill animals (but still eat them...they just have Hindus kill them).  They placed a plate in front of me and I started eating.  I happened to look down at my fork and saw that it had speared a piece of pork that still contained some pork skin.  My stomach turned a tiny bit, but I thought, screw it!  As a Colombian, I grew up eating chicharron, fried pork meat attached to fat attached to skin.  It's all very crunchy.  What was speared on my fork looked boiled.  I immediately thought, don't overthink it...they're watching you...down the gullet!  And as the fork was nearing my widening mouth, I caught a glimpse of a patch of dark pig hair growing out of the skin.  And it was too late.  What my brain registered had not reached my arm and I ended up putting the speared piece of pork inside my mouth.  What was I going to do?  Spit it out in front of my gracious hosts?  Spit it out and offend them as their guest of honor?  I chewed once, twice, and swallowed it whole.)

Chicharron

Emadatse

Anyhow, moral of the story, this girl can eat.  And it seems I passed that on to Des.  The little guy, for as long as he's been eating real people food, shows so much excitement and enthusiasm when he eats.  Even when it was just simple, 1-food-at-a-time, mashed up mush deals, he would say "MMMMmmmmm" when he would eat, his hands opening and closing (his sign for "more"), licking his lips (smacking his lips, almost) in anticipation for the next heavenly bite of mush.

That's some egg on his chin...another favorite food.

  I was going to type out a list of foods that Desmond loves eating, but there's so much he'd eat, that it'd be easier to type the things he doesn't like to eat.  Seriously, he gets so jealous when he sees us enjoying our meals and will start getting antsy and agitated (hands opening and closing and stepping his feet) until we offer him a bite of our lunch or dinner or whatever it is we're having.   Of course, we're not giving him popcorn or anything like that, but if we're having some stir fry or soup, I'll mush it up and feed it to him.  He loves spicy foods like Thai and Indian (Whole Foods had some Indian food in their hot foods bar and, after about 30 minutes in the cart, Des became fussy.  So, I bought food that looked mushy enough for him...hence the Indian food...and gave it to him.  I tasted it and thought that it may be a bit too spicy, so I had water in a cup available for him to sip.  He went crazy for it!)

  Here is a list of foods he generally doesn't like:
Potatoes and parmesan (we buy a packet that's made up of this and he won't eat it)
Any of the food packets with Spinach or peas in them

I hope that this is just a phase and maybe he'll start liking the greens a bit more.  However, I may try the ol' this-is-delicious! trick on him: for example, if I'm eating my delicious oat and marshmallow cereal in the morning and he's having his mushy fruit, he'll start fussing for my cereal.  So, I squeeze a little bit of mush fruit onto his spoon and pretend to eat it, all the while "MMMMMMMmmmm"ing and opening my eyes really wide and nodding my head up and down so that he can see that Mommy thinks this food is delicious and you should, too.  Works about 70% of the time. 

He's eating about every 3-4 hours.  During the day, we give him more milk than regular food, but he's eating more regular food at the times that he does eat regular food. 

P.S. this is really kind of gross, but also all kinds of awesome.  I previously wrote about my bowel elimination habits when I was pregnant.  Desmond, for one day shortly after introducing solids, adopted these habits and, instead of having what you would consider a normal, runny/pasty baby poop, had this gem:

Yep...a little nugget of tightly compacted poop.   I wish all of his BMs were like this.