Carrots are the devil.

We have been starting first foods with DW this week.  I am really "lucky" to live in an era of child-rearing where there are lots of differing opinions on how to go about this.  I won't bore you with all the details of baby food theory, but around here we have no hard and fast rules about food.  We just go with what seems to work.

Most experts do agree though that you should start one food at a time and space them a few days apart, so if an allergic or adverse reaction were to occur you would know which food was the culprit.

Our first food was avocado and I mostly let him play with it instead of trying to get him to take it off the spoon.  Here is is mashing it around:

Adorable.

We did avocado for a few days and next up we tried pureed carrots.  As I spoon fed him the carrots, he was unsure of them.  He made some confused faces, he swallowed a bit, choked on some, and the rest dribbled down his chin.

In the evening he was fussy going to bed. He's like that sometimes, so I thought it was no big deal. I actually thought, maybe he's not getting enough to eat and perhaps we need to work in more food before bedtime. Oh, me. I am so silly.

Now that we seemed to be going full steam ahead on solids, I decided to hit up Target to get some more supplies. While we were there I began to notice that DW was very flatulent, but I just chalked it up to normal baby stuff and bought some mum mums and oatmeal and went on my way.  Here we are cruising the aisles of Target:

That night I thought, hey, let's get crazy and do some oatmeal for dinner. So I mixed up a very small amount of watery oatmeal and fed it to him at dinner.

Here's AW eating some mum mums.

He spit them out afterward.

That night turned into pure hell.  The gassiness escalated and my poor baby was just so gassy he could not sleep unless I was holding him, and then still, he was in pain and discomfort. We spent most of the night rocking in the glider chair as he whimpered helplessly in my arms.

And what is the most self-defeating thing that could happen at 3 am after you just rocked your sick baby to sleep for hours and FINALLY successfully transferred him still asleep to the crib?  You step on that god-awful Laugh and Learn Puppy and he starts happily singing you a love song.  And once you beat him back into silence and stick him back on the shelf, he senses you still may want to play and utters "HUG ME!" as loud as he possibly can.  You are now on my hit list, puppy.  Watch yourself.

Needless to say, DW and I were up all night long and we were both quite unhappy about it.  Even HW had to step in for a few hours to hold him while I got some sleep.  And all day today he was still having a bad reaction, including a rash. I am really hoping the worst is over for now.  It has been a rough 24 hours to say the least.

Now, I don't know for sure if it was the carrots, the oatmeal, just solid food in general, a virus going around or something else entirely, but I'm putting the blame on carrots here.  They suck.  Stupid carrots.  The solid food train has derailed, and we are not hopping back on anytime soon.