Happy Five-Month Birthday!

Five months on Sunday! Hurtling toward the half-year mark. We have a few notable "firsts" this week. The first first, as it were, is that Tor wore shorts. For his baptism, our friends Dave and Lindsay and Andrew and Kit (those "ands" indicate two couples rather than my radical break from serial grammar) gave him outfits involving short pants. Because he's relatively small, I thought the outcome might be something like this:

The $64,000 question: will he have the Karplus calves?

But he rocked them.

"Tee hee"

Li'l Squirt (plus elf booties from Madeline)

We told him he could waterski in Tahoe if he practiced his grip

True to form, Minneapolis was only hot for three days, and then Tor was back to long sleeves and pants.

Such was the attire in which he encountered his second first of those mentioned here: a cloth book! Turns out Little Monkey is much more manipulable than your standard board number. For those whose curiosity runs along the same lines as mine, cloth books do have ISBNs (they appear on a tag along with washing instructions).

And *drumroll* the final first: a foray into solid food! Our pediatrician recommended starting Tor on rice cereal at five months, so we bought a box of Earth's Best Organic Whole Grain Rice Cereal and mixed it with some breast milk, sat the baby in his ultra-plush high chair (the Cadillac of high chairs, seriously--shout-out to Grandpa Chooch and Grandma Charmaine!), busted out the baby flatware set, and got ready for action.

Anticipation, thy name is Tor.

Open wide...

The moment of truth.

"This is what you people eat?!"

There's a reason their short-term memory is very limited.

Tor gamely "ate" a few more bites, by which I mean he let me dump a spoonful into his mouth and then dribbled it out over the next ten seconds. The jury is out on whether he actually swallowed any. The whole experience seemed to confuse him.

 Then Lars hit on the idea of immediately chasing each bite with a teething toy shaped like a nipple. Because Tor would suck on the toy's nipplish top, he ended up getting some cereal down. I think.

The endeavor concluded with Tor getting distracted by his greed for Nipple Head.

We're willing to call it a success, all told. The long-term plan: for the next two weeks, he gets one cereal meal a day in addition to his 8-10 milk feedings. Then we can start adding new foods, one per week. Readers! What shall we try next?