Cleaning and Solid Foods!

What a productive day we had today! As promised, M and I spent several hours this morning working on the house. I started in the bathroom, which hasn't had a really good cleaning in months and needed it badly. I mucked it out and scrubbed it down, right down to going after the grout  with an old toothbrush, cleaning the mirror and mopping the floor. It looks and smells like a new bathroom! M did even better than that though, he worked on the kitchen and got it looking amazing. Most of the time when we clean the kitchen, we wash the dishes and give the counter a quick wipe and call it good, but oh no. He got all the stuff off the counters and put it away, he scrubbed off the stove, he swept the floor. I came along and mopped it, and now it looks super. It looked so good that I was motivated to go in tonight and wash the new dishes that had accumulated, just to keep it looking that way. I love when things are clean, almost as much as I hate cleaning!

My ambition is to devote several hours a day to doing nothing (except babytending) besides cleaning the house. We've got a great start, and I need to build on it. Robert is gaining more mobility every day, and having a dirty house is moving from slovenly to actually dangerous. We have to change. I have to change. I am a lazy, dirty person, and I have to change, for the sake of my baby, and my family, and for my own sake. It's just so doggone hard.

The big news today, though, was the advent of solid food! We cleared off the dining table and got the high chair down from the attic. Our high chair is not exactly a proper high chair, it's a booster high chair that straps to a regular chair but takes up less room. Less room is good! We stuck Robert in there with a big bib on, and gave him rice cereal mixed with a lot of formula. He did really well! We videotaped almost the entire experiment, you can watch the videos here and here on Vimeo. Even though he did pretty well with his first exposure to spoon-feeding, he's not ready for that to be even a major source of nutrition quite yet. I think of it as practice runs, getting him ready for the next phase of his eating career. When he'd gotten tired and cranky from us poking the spoon at him, we wiped him down (yay, 30 boxes of babywipes!) and gave him his bottle.  It was a very good first effort, and we'll do it again tomorrow!