Solid (Well, Sort Of) Food

Tonight Aaron ate his first solid (if you can call extremely runny rice cereal solid) food. It was quite exciting. He actually did pretty well with it--a lot better than I was expecting. He didn't seem to mind the taste too much; it was mostly the spoon he didn't seem to like. I have no idea if I was doing it right, though. I just kinda stuck the spoon a little bit in his mouth and half-let him suck on it and half-poured the cereal into his mouth. And of course it got all over him. But isn't that the point of feeding babies anything besides milk?

Mmmmm, single-grain rice cereal from a spoon...

The rice cereal aftermath

He has become quite the renaissance baby. He's eaten breast milk, a variety of baby formulas, diluted apple juice, and rice cereal; and he's eaten from a breast, a bottle, a little tube on a finger, and now, a spoon.

Halloween

On Halloween, I made Dinner In a Pumpkin. This has long been a tradition in my family. However, up until just a couple years ago, my mom always used a recipe that was, well, gross. Luckily, she recently tried some different recipes that gave new life to Dinner In a Pumpkin and saved the tradition from certain doom. Last year I made it myself for the first time from a recipe I found on the internet. It was pretty yummy, so I made it again this year from the same recipe (I omitted the mushrooms though):

Dinner In a Pumpkin

1 med. size pumpkin, topped and cleaned out
1 lb. ground beef, browned and drained
1 pkg. UNCLE BEN'S® long and wild rice, fixed according to directions
1 can mushrooms or 1 c. fresh mushrooms
1 can cream of mushroom soup

Combine ingredients and put in pumpkin. Put top on pumpkin. Place pumpkin on cookie sheet in oven preheated to 350 degrees. Bake for 2 hours.

Serve dinner in pumpkin. May use pumpkin as vegetable and serve with butter and brown sugar or honey. Do not open pumpkin while baking or it will expand and top will not fit on pumpkin again.

The night before, we carved pumpkins. Here's a picture of our masterpieces:

After putting Aaron to bed (he wore his costume for about half an hour), we had dinner, handed out candy, and finished out the evening eating Muddy Buddies and watching Simpson's Treehouse of Horror.