Beets Me!

Day 2 was much the same, but with some advances in twin-feeding technique. I was able to bottle-feed both Evan and Ryan at the same time. Perhaps in future posts I will describe the various ways I have discovered for carrying, lifting, and otherwise manipulating two babies at once.

A couple of weeks ago, DW and I got it into our heads that we should make our own baby food. It's basically just boiled and mashed vegetables, which retail for about 12 cents per ounce. Surely it is cost-effective to do it ourselves?

Plus, there's more opportunity for variety. With commercial baby food, there's pretty much two colors: orange and green. Orange is pumpkin, squash, sweet potato and carrot. Green is peas, and green beans. That's it. That's the whole diet, and the babies don't really care for green beans. Having tried it, I must say, they have a point.

So we considered the whole vegetable department at the store to be fair game. Among the exotic vegetables we took home was (cue the scary music) a BEET.

I've never really likes beets, and I don't know anyone who does, except old people who fondly remember subsisting on them during the war. There's the token beet bin in the salad bar, which like anchovies on pizza, is only there because it has to be for some reason. But objectively, there's nothing really wrong with the sweet, but slightly earthy root, and in any case, there's no reason the next generation should be hung up on my food aversions.

After slicing, boiling and mashing this thing, the kitchen looked like a scene of massive beet slaughter. That should have been a warning to me of things to come.

Ryan was the first to get the exciting new cuisine. He took some eagerly, and then gave me a look that I only saw once before when I gave him a little piece of onion. Then he spit it all over his bib. For the next two days, he refused to eat anything on a spoon from me. Yet, the tiny amount of juice remaining in his mouth permitted us to precisely time the progress of his digestive tract. "The beets have arrived" came abut 12 hours later.

Last night was Evan's turn. We gave him a little beet, since the alternative was to throw it out. He was a little more open to the experience. He got a puzzled look that you might expect from a wine-taster who was given a glass of vinegar as a joke. Then, like a wine-taster, he spit it out. Ever optimistic, I gave him a second spoon, and the experience seemed to grow on him. But it was just getting too messy.

After dinner, he began spitting up. Maybe he does this all the time, and we don't notice because it's not normally bright red. I changed his beet-colored clothes and put him in pajamas. Then he spit up again. I changed him into some new pajamas. He spit up on those. He spit up on the floor, so that Ryan could crawl through it, and get his clothes beeten too. He spit up on us. Eventually, we just left them both naked and followed Evan around with a paper towel. Nathan was a big help, sounding the alarm "Oh no, red spit up!" from time to time. An hour later, I was changing his diaper on the bed, when he spit up one more time. I carefully rotated him like a drippy paint brush, while calling for more paper towel.

Beets, like so many of my experiments in food, are now banned from the house. (Ask me about the shiitake mushroom story. Or the kimchi.) They seem to spread their vile influence to everything they touch. There's actually a medical condition called "Beeturia" which is exactly what it sounds like (A: Aaah! My baby is peeing blood!! B: Ok, calm down. Has he eaten any beets? A: Oh... why, yes... B: Ok, there's nothing to be alarmed about...) On another side note, there's a condition called "Carotenemia". What's next, "Celeryac disease"?