Demarcation

This is my first actual blog post.

Every post in this blog before this one has been copied here from an awkward, terse text file on my Palm Pilot, where I had been keeping rough notes on Claire's various milestones and adventures. "At least," I thought, "this way I can record stuff about Claire when it happens, and someday I will go back, clean the text up, and put it somewhere, uh, better."

Well, behold... the future is now! I have just realized, only a few short years into the blogging craze, that a blog is the perfect place to chronicle Claire's early years.

I had completely forsaken blogs until recently. Blogs do still make me think of slanted and ugly political non-journalism, meaningless rumor sites, or blogs about other bloggers. But after using a blog at work to track how to charge my time, I realized that a blog is the perfect place to chronicle Claire's early years (until she can handle this herself) because:

• It's a date-based record.
• I can add a few notes from anywhere with internet access.
• It's automatically backed up (somewhere).
• It's free.
• I already had an account through google; no new account necessary.
  

Anyways, this is a blog about Claire, not about blogging. Man, this is the absolute worst kind of blog post, the lowest of the low... a blog about blogging. Excuse me while I slap myself.

In my defense, I just wanted to add an entry to sort of demarcate the "old stuff" and the "new stuff". So here you go. Now back to Claire and the fun stuff.

The Daily Menu

Here is Claire's menu these days. This is actually handy just for myself as a quick reference when I feel like there's nothing for her to eat. Plus it's taken a while to work out a good eating plan, so I'd like to document this success.

Breakfast
Always starts with whole milk, and on alternating days one of...

• Whole wheat "baby" oatmeal
  
• Frozen whole wheat pancakes

She definitely prefers the "pancakecakes", as she calls them, and requests them often, even for dinner. It is often the first word out of her mouth in the morning.

Occasionally when I have time in the morning, I cook up a tomato/onion/pepper/cheese omelet instead, which she enjoys. (Hmm, I should try this sometimes for dinners to vary things up.)

She used to eat fruit in the mornings too, especially watermelon, but lately she is not so interested.

Lunch / Dinner
Start with a vegetable, which is pretty much down to one of:

• Sliced tomato (aka, a 'mato)
• Canned green beans
• Steamed brocolli (which she can actually say well and occasionally requests)
• Maybe black beans or black eyed peas
  

At either lunch or dinner, she gets 4 oz full fat yogurt or cottage cheese for the main course.

For the other meal of the day, she gets one of these for her entre:

• Frozen "Doctor Praeger's" broccoli or spinach and potato pancake
• Cheese ravioli or tortellini
• Sliced deli turkey
• Rice & beans
• A quesadilla, aka a "kadeeya!", such as a frozen one from Sam's Club, or a"Mini Me" quesadilla from Moe's if we're out. I have not perfected the homemade quesadilla yet.
  
• Random leftovers from our meals or eating out. If she's lucky it's beef brisket, pulled chicken, or something like that, ideally something with some fat and/or protein.

Then a fruit:

• A chopped up orange, which she usually likes
• A few strawberries, which she often requests as "strawburdy!"
• Grapes (sliced up to avoid choking!)
• Watermelon
• She's medium on most other "misc" fruit as everyday fare, but we have had some success with the occasional peach or pear.
• Bananas are completely avoided since they are constipating, although she knows what they are called and can say "banana" real well.
• Apples were on our no-eat list until recently, because one of Claire's doctors told me it was constipating too. That has since been rebuked by another doctor, so we might give them a try.
  

Finally, a bread:

• Usually a whole wheat pita
• Maybe some sort of grainy cracker
• Occasionally a tortilla or bagel
• A graham cracker if she's real lucky ("Cracker! Cracker!")