Rowan and I head to the airport today. We're going to Georgia for a week to visit Grandmommy, Papa, Aunt Julie, Uncle Bobby, and the rest of the family down there. I have a paper deadline shortly after Christmas, and things weren't progressing as well as they needed to in our "normal" setting, so (as I've done twice in the past with great success) I'll be sequestering myself upstairs at my parents' house and working until my vision gets blurry each day, while Rowan gets being spoiled unspeakably at the hands of his loving relatives.
That's all well and good, but this post is really about breakfast. See, this morning our usual breakfast choices for Rowan were eliminated for various reasons. Bananas and Cheerio's, no because that'll be the go-to snack while we're in the airport. Oatmeal, no, because it takes too long and he slept in and therefore was hungry *now*. Something new? Something different? So I made cheese toast for him and sliced it into little "sticks", and gave him a bowl of apple sauce and a cup of milk. He looked at it all with skepticism at first, but quickly dug in. It was a moment after he had started happily eating that I looked over and observed what he was doing: he was dipping the cheese toast sticks into the apple sauce, wearing a grin the whole time! This is funny because it was only a couple of days ago that we allowed him to start trying a bit of dipping sauce. It's amazing how well he'll eat some chicken when he can dip it in a little sweet & sour. Yes, he did try to pick up the sauce container and drink from it, but eventually he realized he wasn't supposed to do that. It was very surreal watching my child pick up a dainty little piece of chicken, dip it carefully into sauce so as not to drop the tasty morsel, and place it accurately onto his tongue and give a satisfied, "mmm" while he chewed. Wow, how far we've come from having to help him pick up a Cheerio because he hadn't yet mastered the "pincher grip"! Onward and...er...dipward, people! :-)