Hungry by Sheila Himmel Read Free Book Online Page A

responsibility, for the first time since driver’s education, with tales of horror and gore. A mother from the previous class gave a stitch-by-stitch account of her emergency episiotomy. We toured the ICU. I hadn’t been a hospital patient since having my tonsils out at age four, and that was not a good memory. Even the ice cream at the end didn’t soothe the pain.
    But when Jacob was born, I would have liked to have lingered in the hospital. He slept, I slept, he was carried in to me, food came to me with no cooking or cleaning, and I had my own room. Except for the crying, it was like a luxury spa.
    Which all evaporated when we went home and he became colicky, forgot how to nurse, and slept only when we were awake. I got so groggy that I mistook apple juice for vegetable oil, and served a sweet, rock-hard quiche to guests. Jacob got an ear infection in his second month, and I nearly poured the liquefied antibiotic into his ear instead of his mouth because by the time we got home I couldn’t recall what the doctor had said to do with the pink bottle. Luckily the advice nurse was on duty.
    Clearly I should have read up on lactation, but it had seemed so obvious. We called the Nursing Mothers Council, a volunteer group that sent over an angel of mercy to help me with technique. From then, feeding went pretty well until it was time for solid foods.
    Now came the book buying. The classic Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care for a calm, genial, trust-your-instincts kind of approach and at the other end, books by Penelope Leach and T. Berry Brazelton. These two were steeped in the “attachment theory” that working mothers could not help reading as an attack. If you weren’t home all the time, bonding, you were separating, causing anxiety. There were plenty of people around who regarded daycare as bordering on a post-Ceauescu Romanian orphanage, where starving children were tied to their beds.
    I was pretty sure if I stayed home all day, I’d become the Romanian dictator. I wasn’t going to worry too much about leaving my children in the hands of recommended professionals. Now that we had a healthy baby, keeping him that way was our purpose in life. Feed Me, I’m Yours promised “Baby Food Made Easy! Delicious, Nutritious, and Fun Things You Can Cook Up for Your Kids!” It introduced the “Plop” Method:
    1. Take pureed or finely ground foods and “plop” by spoonfuls onto a cookie sheet. The size of each “plop” depends on how much you think the baby will eat at one meal.
    2. Freeze “plops” quickly.
    3. When frozen, remove from sheet and transfer to plastic bag.
    4. Label and date.
    The author, Vicki Lansky, also gave the following key advice:
    A child needs far less food than many parents expect. A child eats when hungry, and will take just what he or she needs to maintain his/her growth rate. Servings should be small so as not to be discouraging . . . so should the plates or bowls.
    I took the plates and bowls part seriously. In our cupboards, small plastic dishes stacked up as if we were Tupperware magnates, but Jacob didn’t much care. His eating was erratic at best.
    We bought every kind of baby food, even those little hot dogs that look like fingers in water. We’d try anything, if only our fussy firstborn would eat it.
    Jacob grew, but very slowly, to sixteen pounds by his first birthday. His arms were so thin that he had to get immunizations in his thigh. He had blood tests, even a test for cystic fibrosis. He was fine. We were nuts. I bought more plates. Another pediatrician had suggested using adult-size plates, so the food looked small.
    Restaurants were a breeze at first. But once Jacob reached toddler stage, he dropped plates to the floor and preferred to talk at the table, anything but take in food. Just like at home.
    Jacob was a chatty but runty two-year-old when I became pregnant again, and our pediatrician said the presence of a competitor at the table might stimulate his appetite. We’d