feed me ... no wait, don't

Meal time with a baby is sort of like what I imagine kite-surfing to be like, just a whole lotta crazy.

Asa, like me, goes from happy to hungry and irritable in 3 seconds flat. The only thing that makes this okay is that he is hungry at the same times every day so we can anticipate, prepare and try to prevent the meltdowns. What's nutty is, he can be done eating after just a few bites of food. I mean like 5 bites and he's suddenly not interested in anymore. And it isn't just food, he'll do this with nursing as well, which let me tell you, is incredibly annoying and painful.

Here's an example of a typical morning meal with Asa. It's 6am, we've been up for a few minutes and made it downstairs. He's playing on the floor while I'm sipping a hot chai and Jeff is starting to make breakfast for Asa. All the sudden I have a tiny person trying to climb my legs, whining and crying and basically begging to be fed. We plunk him in the highchair and toss some cheerios at him while the oatmeal and apple sauce warms in the microwave. The cheerios do the trick (he's had like 10 individual o's), and after maybe 4 bites of applesauce he's through and now he's twisting his body around trying to see what I'm doing and wanting to get down and play.

Around 7:30 I start offering him bites of food on the go. A spoonful of breakfast in between toys, another on the stairs, more while we sit on the floor and watch the morning news. By 8:15 he's either eaten all of it or left over half of it, I can never predict how it will play out. By 8:17 he's ready to nurse because apparently, he's starved. So we nurse and he either is totally focused and nurses for 10 minutes or totally distracted and spends 3 minutes just licking/poking/gnawing on me until I throw in the towel and decide the nutritional benefit for Asa isn't worth the risk to my abused body.

Either way the story ends with Asa happily snoozing before daycare and me scrambling around, starved, trying to pull myself together to get out the door, usually forgetting to feed myself anything besides that hot chai (that is no ice cold and only half drank) three hours earlier. Kite surfing and feeding a baby, both physically challenging and never exactly the same from one day to the next.