Eat at Maummm's

This pregnancy is giving me food trouble. I can't remember whether I had this much trouble last time. I know in the first trimester I was sicker, but in the second was I having so much "nothing sounds good"-itis? Yesterday I was home early to watch Chloë and trying to come up with something for lunch. I didn't want toast. I didn't want peanut butter. I didn't want pasta or a burrito or soup or anything we had handy. I rifled through the cupboards in desperation and found the ingredients for rosemary-artichoke hummus, and decided that that didn't sound bad, and anyway I needed protein. First I had to get Chloë her lunch, but she's easy; she ended up with scrambled eggs with cheese. Then I started the hummus.

Chloë got interested and, when I spooned it into a bowl, wanted a taste. Now, this stuff has garlic, and rosemary, and lemon juice, and chickpeas. It is very much Weird Food, as Eric calls it. But Eric had also just told me about an article he'd read that mentioned strong tastes, like garlic, get into amniotic fluid and babies whose mothers eat such things prefer them afterward, and I know I wasn't having food trouble my entire pregnancy with her. So I figured I'd let her try. I scooped a little into a baby spoon and handed it down.

She made a peculiar face, and I looked around for her sippy to help her wash the taste away. Then she made her "Uh! Uh!" noise and pointed the spoon up at me. "More?" I said hopefully. She nodded, and I gave her another spoonful. And another. Eventually, replete, she stopped begging for more and I was able to eat some myself. Yes, she's definitely my daughter.

And very recently she's started claiming me as someone other than "Dada." We've been coaxing her to say "Mama" for months. She still doesn't, quite, but she does say "Mom." Or rather, "Maummm..." like she's trying to say that final A but it gets stuck on her tongue. It's cute, and I love it. Though she woke up in the night last night and was screaming "Maummm...! Maummm...!" and I thought it might have been better to let her keep on calling me Dada.