This is obviously Sophie’s week.
A video from last night’s dinner:
Sophia tastes Thai red curry from Domenico Bettinelli on Vimeo.
As most of my readers probably know, Sophie’s been on a pretty restricted diet. She had almost a month of really bad digestive issues this fall, which we think were due to a wheat sensitivity. Since then we’ve still been fighting with a very sensitive diaper area. Because she seems to relapse into nasty rash every few weeks, I’ve been very hesitant to introduce new foods and most of what she eats is pretty bland. But things have been going much better recently and the sensitive skin seems to be more under control, so I’m starting to loosen up and let her experiment a little more.
She’s had small tastes of pasta sauce (just not the pasta), beef stroganoff sauce (minus the noodles) and other tasty dishes. And she’s loved them. This little girl craves food with flavor. Not that I blame her. Still, we’re taking it slowly and I don’t want to introduce too many new factors at once.
Yesterday we’d tried oranges for the first time. She loved, loved, loved them. But let’s keep it to one new food a day. Last night I figured I’d keep her to familiar standbys. She had roasted chicken, white rice, grapes, yogurt, rice puffs, cheese. But partway through dinner she got very cranky. I tried to tease her appetite with more chicken, putting bits of rice in her mouth, but she was having none of it. She really, really wanted what was in my bowl. Certainly, she thought, it must be tastier than all the stuff I was giving her. But I wasn’t going to give my sensitive baby hot curry, so I kept pressing the chicken and rice.
Finally, I gave in and scooped her out of her high chair and sat her on my lap to see if I couldn’t coax her better that way. She continued to scream, even amped up the volume. She really wanted my curry. Fine. I did the immature thing and decided that if she wanted it so much she could have it. Let her deal with a little spicy curry, burn her tongue, and then drink a bunch of water and be done with it.
Except she didn’t find it too spicy at all. She sucked on my carrots and then spit them out. But not because she didn’t like the curry sauce. She just doesn’t like carrots very much. She tried some rice next and that was more to her liking. She nibbled at my chicken, ate a little bite of zucchini but ejected the next bit. And then decided to stick to the rice with curry sauce. She ate until there was no more rice in my bowl.
What a cutie!