Starting Solids

Last weekend Smug-Baby grabbed a lemon slice from the table at Olive Garden and immediately stuck it in her mouth. She loved it, so we grabbed the camera and took some pictures of her first taste of food beyond mama's milk.

So, after that I figured that we might as well start letting her try stuff, and I got a little watermelon at the store this week. I gave her a few big pieces to play with and while she loved watching the red fruit slide around the tray, she didn't really care for it when she stuck a piece in her mouth. She did that shudder you do when something tastes bitter or sour.

Last night we tried a bit of mashed sweet potato along with some chucks she could just play with. She shuddered again and gagged and spit it out with vigor! She does not seem to care for food as anything more than a play toy.

This personally is fine with me. I love nursing her and don't love the idea of moving beyond it to the next stage. I don't think that I will nurse until she is 7 or anything, but I'm sure not in a rush and if she wants to still be nursing at 2 or so, I think that I will be fine with that.

That brings me to my next topic.

I watched a pretty awful movie this week called "The Back Up Plan" with Jennifer Lopez and the thing that made it horrible was that the story was undeveloped and disjointed and it was hard to like the characters when you didn't really get to know them.

The movie is about a woman who decides to have artificial insemination because she is getting older and has not found "the one" yet. On the day she has the procedure she meets Stan, and they connect and have a date or two before she tells him that she is pregnant. He decides she is worth it and they (I guess) move in together. (All this happens in about 12 minutes of screen time). They appear to move in together after one date and a strange weekend getaway where they have sex, she says "I'm pregnant" and he sleeps on the couch. They have the scripted ups and downs and she kicks him out only to discover she loves him just as she goes into labor. The End.

The thing that I found most distasteful about the movie is the scene where they attend a friend's home birth. The filmmakers felt the need to make this group of people appear as crazy as possible. There is the mother nursing her 3 year old, the water bath pool, and the hippie banging on a drum during the labor and delivery and of course, the nut job giving birth in a pool. She makes crazy faces and noises and demands that J.Lo not move because she is "my focal point"

Here is the thing, maybe this is funny for those never having been through the birth process, but I found it offensive. I have been in labor, had natural childbirth and subscribe to several of the philosophy’s they make fun of. I think that water birth would be wonderful and would have had one if the hospital in my area was the least bit progressive.

Everyone labors differently and to make this woman look so strange (when of course during her own labor and delivery scene, J.Lo looks lovely with a sexy sheen of sweet to denote the work she is doing) has the effect of making me (perhaps others) feel self conscious about labor not to mention an unrealistic picture of what natural childbirth or home birth is and isn't.

I had a wonderful birth experience and I feel like Hollywood has the chance to really influence people's thinking and change the way things are viewed and they choose to make birth feel like this hippie dippy crap and that is just sad.