The Janester is eating this up.

This girl is my little sous chef.
She likes to sit next to the counter in her high chair while I cook.
I give her pieces of things that we are cooking with for her to feel and play with.
Mostly it ends up on the floor.

Like these noodles.



But then
she started putting things to her mouth.
And then
sometimes she would nibble at them.
And now
she has started to bite them.
And one day a few weeks ago,
she stuck her hand in my potato salad and proceeded to lick her fingers!

It's pretty exciting for all of us.
Bread is a little scary, since she can get such big bites off.
And she will only eat fruit if she can feed it to herself.
It gets slippery, but she always keeps trying.
The core of a pineapple is perfect.
She even tries to eat limes, though I have no idea why because no one around here eats them [except the garbage disposal].


One day she tried out a spoon to get some ice cream cake Grandma Sue brought over.
[though we have had a hard time getting her to do this again.]


York peppermint patties are her favorite
[besides ice cream and cake and cheese and yogurt and...I'll stop there.]
They are perfect for her because she can hold them [not too slippery], they are meltable enough for her to be able to break down without chewing, and when they are refrigerated they are a little harder to break, which means she can't get impossibly humongous bites off.
Papa Dave and Grandma Sue snagged her a giant size one last weekend.
She dined blissfully and consumed half of it in one sitting.
I was too happy to care that she dropped it on the floor at least three times.
I was also too busy thinking of how we could make all her food into patties.

But I came up with nothing.

I guess we'll just have to keep trying with the spoon.

Though I'll still take fingers any day.