Drew has officially begun his foray into the realm of "real" food this week. We've gotten to the point where he will no longer allow Andy or myself to eat without trying to intercept the food between our plates and our mouths and munch on whatever it may be himself, so there was no more denying the inevitable. (Try eating a bowl of yogurt with a squirming kid on your lap grabbing at every spoon and trying to steer it anywhere but at your face and imagine the multitude of possible results, very few of them involving you actually getting to consume said yogurt...)

So we pulled out his high chair and his plastic bib and his various plastic dishes and buckled down to the business of smearing powdered oatmeal all over everything in a 10 foot radius. (Laura, you will appreciate that Drew has the same bias as his cousin towards food belonging all over the back of his head!) Needless to say, this has increased the bath to day ratio rather significantly.

Drew has taken to food easily- we weren't too worried since he's been sucking on fruit without much trouble for a while now- although I have to say that his response to the oatmeal was mostly just a fair quantity of chagrin. Clearly, when he was trying to express to us that he was interested in eating people food, he wasn't quite explicit enough. He thinks that mushy baby muck is a poor excuse at best for big guy food and sort of gave me this look like "Seriously? What happened to the bagel and cream cheese? I don't believe for a second you eat this junk!" (To his credit, Andy tried the oatmeal mush and was revolted that we could feed something so vile to someone we care about. I tried to explain that it's baby food and babies like to eat things like that, but I don't think Drew's reaction helped to sell my case.) Either way, I've been trying to explain to Drew that this is just a step he has to work through and then he can build up to the stuff with flavor. Fortunately he's being a good sport in the hopes that something better will indeed come along soon.

We took some videos with our new teeny tiny camcorder of his first meal that I'll try to post soon.

The other very fun thing that Drew does these days is talk to us. And by talk, I mean SHRIEK. He's found his voice and very joyously likes to utilize it at top volume. It's very cute to see him get all excited when Andy comes home from work at the end of the day and scream at him in delight. He also likes to have yelling matches back and forth with me- I'm wondering if it's actually partly a result of the music classes we're taking, which focus on audiation and repetition- whether that's the case or not, it's lots of fun to finally get to hear some of what he has to say!