Photographic evidence of our first attempt to feed Leta "solid" food, although I don't know why they call it solid because there is nothing solid about it. If it were solid then she wouldn't be able to paint with it, and you can clearly see here that her face is her canvas:

I only fed her three tiny spoonfuls of sweet potatoes none of which actually made it into her mouth. I have to be honest here and admit that I thought it would be easy to feed a baby, how hard could it be, right? You just shove a little bit of food into her mouth and she'll swallow it like a normal human being. She sticks everything else into her mouth, she'll be delighted that this particular thing actually has taste! A sweet taste! Not at all bitter like the paper towels she SNATCHES out of my hands and shoves down her throat!

(Best baby toy on earth: The Paper Towel)

How many times have I seen a picture like the one above? I always thought that parents smeared the food on the baby's face because babies are cute with mushy vegetables on their foreheads. Who doesn't love a baby with carrots dripping from her nostrils? That's a perk of parenthood, getting to decorate one's baby with colorful foodstuffs and then taking a picture and posting it on the Internet, right? But the baby SELF-DECORATES, and the mess from this self-decoration becomes exponentially worse by the second as it travels from spoon to face to hand to everything within a two-mile radius. Yesterday morning they found sweet potatoes splattered all over the gates of the Mormon Temple downtown.

I had to take the idiocy one step further and carry out this experiment on our couch. Our custom-made, blue velvet, imported down filled couch. And in the panic of the moment I couldn't think straight, and instead of doing the thinking-straight thing and running to get wipes to salvage our couch and our coffee table and the refinished hardwood floors, I did the non-thinking-straight thing which seemed like the thinking-straight thing at the time, and I began LICKING UP THE SWEET POTATOES WITH MY TONGUE, starting with her face.

That was the fun part.

I licked her cheeks and her nose, then her hands and wrists, and then I ate her chin, and then her third and fourth chin. This did nothing to alleviate the mess. It did, however, taste very sweet, and now I have a faint orange tattoo of a small hand on my forehead.

I think we'll try solid foods again next year. Or never.