How Do You Feed Yourself When You Have a Small Person Strapped to You?

This is all new to me and I have never seen so many crumbs in my life.

My son is a little more than four months old now. Like Heidi from Heidi, he prefers to live on an all-milk diet. His mothers and I are very broad-minded. “If all he wants is milk,” we say, “then by all means let him have it. That just means more dinner for us.”

Splendid and satisfying is the sight of a properly fat baby, with elegant little creases and divots and folds in the places where wrists and ankles and knees will someday be. It’s a pleasure to see a four-month-old baby drink milk. There’s a very satisfying process to it. When a bottle or a breast heaves into his line of sight, he trembles all over like a motorized starfish before glomming on and setting-to with wobbly, frenzied glee.

Then, after a great deal of thrashing and dribbling and wasted motion, a majestic placidity falls over his little moon face. All at once the baby is seized by a great and ancient dignity, like a Roman emperor who has decided to spare all the gladiators in the arena for the evening

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“Leave me,” the little moon face seems to say, as consciousness rolls out like the tide from underneath his eyelids. “Leave me be, now. I forgive it all. You have pleased me, you may live. Go in peace and grow in wisdom.”

I feel very much the same way about my own meals. When I’m in the middle of one, everything seems hazy and surreal, like how people describe being attacked by a shark feels: “It all happened so fast. I really couldn’t tell you what happened. One minute I was swimming alone, and the next minute part of me appeared to be missing.”

Once it starts, all I can do is hang on and hope to make it through to the end. People say it’s better to eat mindfully, but I’d rather not eat at all than put my fork down after every single bite to smile gently at the horizon and wait to finish swallowing before picking it back up again. I’m like my baby in that way in that when I eat, I like to eat, and I make no bones about it. We can worry about the mess afterwards — that’s what all the little towels are for.

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Since the baby arrived, every lamp, chair, fan, and bookcase in the house has become a resting place for at least one and sometimes three little towels of the sort that other people buy for you in order to sop up after your baby’s various dampnesses. They’re tremendous and they work just as well for adults as they do for infants. I’ve never been so powder-dry in all my life.

As is often the case with parents of a new baby, our own mealtimes are a rolling, informal affair, like a medieval Royal Progress. By the time I’ve finished breakfast, Lily is just getting ready for hers, and Grace usually takes her first meal sometime after I’ve finished washing the dishes from lunch. The two of them often have their supper around the time I start going to bed.

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I have always been an adherent of early dinner. “It frees up your whole evening,” is my watchword — never mind what dinner at 4:30 p.m. is supposed to free up your evening for. Now that the baby’s here, I have nearly endless license to pursue my dinner earlier and earlier into the afternoon. I realize, of course, that there is a natural stopping point somewhere. I cannot possibly eat dinner before I’ve finished breakfast, for example. Something will surely slow me down at some point.

Lately I’ve found myself taking most of my meals over the baby’s head. It’s a lot of fun, wearing a baby. I get to fuss with cords and fasteners and rigging as I lash him into place, which makes me feel like a three-masted ship. Once he’s hitched in, I can do almost anything, as long as I don’t try to sit down, or bend over, or stop moving for more than 15 seconds.

"I wonder if you’ve ever tried to eat soup while the howls of your firstborn child flood your body with a wretched, icy vigilance? I don’t recommend it. "

Daniel M. Lavery

For a while I tried to time my meals against his sleep schedule, but that didn’t work very well. I’d gotten overly used to the extensive naps of his very early infancy, when there was time to do laundry and tidy up before I thought about having a bite to eat. There was about a week running where I kept stubbornly trying to eat a bowl of soup 45 minutes into his nap. Like clockwork, he’d wake up the moment I brought the spoon to my lips. I wonder if you’ve ever tried to eat soup while the howls of your firstborn child flood your body with a wretched, icy vigilance? I don’t recommend it.

Then I tried eating soup as soon as he fell asleep, but that didn’t work very well either. Roughly half of his naps are false alarms, to test our watchfulness, and it seemed to me that he could sense the times that I legged it out of the nursery a little too quickly in my haste.

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“So it’s soup you’re after, is it?” his cries seemed to say. “What a leisurely little treat you’ve planned for yourself, my good man. But what a pity you forgot to consult me first! I’m afraid I haven’t made room for any leisure on the docket for this afternoon. Put me in my little chair with sea creatures on it, and press some of the buttons on it at once, or you’ll have more problems than mere souplessness on your hands.”

It’s not a brisk food, soup, and I’ve learned that new parents have no business eating that much of it. It’s a sedate, two-handed meal, one that requires the elegance and leisure of the gentleman. You run into the same problems with oatmeal. Oatmeal only tastes good at a temperature designed to burn the delicate skin of an infant’s head, and of course you’re likelier to spill oatmeal when it’s hot. I don’t know why that should be so, but it is. You can either miserably eat a wad of cold porridge over your baby’s head in unhappy safety, or enjoy a few piping-hot spoonfuls before scalding his forehead. There is no satisfactory in-between.

The best foods to eat over your baby’s head are room-temperature, minimally crumb-producing, and able to be wielded with one hand, but at what price efficiency? The body might survive, but my spirit quails at the prospect of an all-beef-jerky diet.

"A sandwich is a fine thing for anybody carrying a baby around."

Daniel M. Lavery

A sandwich — now a sandwich is a fine thing for anybody carrying a baby around. I have a turkey sandwich at least once a day now, and very often twice. You don’t realize how many crumbs a turkey sandwich produces with each bite until you’ve eaten one just a few inches over a little bald head. So I’ve pared it down to only the essential elements of turkey, cheese, and a thin scraping of condiments, in order to minimize the layer of detritus that settles on his scalp while he bobs around happily beneath my lunch. Once, in a moment of great desperation or hubris, I ate a fresh July peach over his sleeping head, and spent the rest of the afternoon doing laundry.

The solution to getting crumbs off the baby is to give him a gentle once-over with one of the many towels you’ve got slung over your various household surfaces afterwards. These blessed little towels can do everything.

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We also live with two little dogs, one weighing 10 pounds and the other five, who are similarly magnetized to their meals. They spend much of the day between their own breakfast and dinner in following the baby around, trying to lick up any spare milk or accidental crumbs he happens to unloose. For several hours every afternoon we resemble a little chuck wagon party, all trailing after one another; I dropping occasional fragments of crust and cheese on my son’s head, who in turn discharges little blurts of milk onto the floor, and eventually everything is dispatched by the little jaws waiting just below our feet.

“Someday you’re going to want this,” I inform my son as he watches a stray bit of cheese tumble to the floor with only mild interest. “Someday even you will know the pleasure of soup, and what it’s like to want to sit down to it.”

Then we start the slow march around the kitchen again, because I’ve slowed down too much for his liking to admonish him, and he won’t stop yelling until I pick up the pace. Lucky for the boy his father is relentless, and full of turkey sandwiches. I could walk around this kitchen all day.

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