cuisine de ali

This morning, we were playing in Ali’s bedroom, and she reached towards my mouth. She does this often, as she likes pointing out my teeth and saying “teef!!”. So I opened my mouth really wide for her as usual. For some reason I failed to notice that her thumb and index finger were together. All of a sudden, she dropped something in my mouth and I felt something small and rubbery on my tongue. Immediately recalling her affinity for eating dead ladybugs, I sat up really fast and spit. Luckily, it was just one of her pigtail rubberbands that she found on the ground. She was just grinning at her accomplishment of feeding Mommy!

Lesson learned: make sure that baby is not holding anything between fingers before letting her reach for mouth.

For those of you who didn’t read my old note on Facebook (pre-blog days) about Ali’s ladybug liking, here it is:

Remember all of the ladybugs that we got in our house? Well, there are still one or two here or there, and dead ladybug carcasses show up every now and then. Last week, Ali and I were playing in her room, and I saw her get really still and focused on something on the carpet, then pop! She grabbed it and popped it into her mouth really quickly. Then she got this grotesque look on her face, like it tasted awful. So I went over there and started digging around in her mouth, and managed to salvage two spotted ladybug wings. Yup, the meaty part went down the hatch. Every few minutes after that, she would get that nasty look on her face again. Apparently, Ladybugs have a nice aftertaste too.We had a doctor’s appointment that afternoon for her one year checkup, and the doctor was going through the developmental milestone questions, like “Does she help get herself dressed?”, and she asked “Can she pick up very small objects with her thumb and index finger?”, and so I said “well, she ate a ladybug this morning. . . “, and she said “Good! Good. . .” Needless to say, I am being much more observant and committed to picking up any ladybugs laying around.