Assume the Position

At five and a half months, we started feeding Anya solid foods. Carrots and peas were the big winners, applesauce and butternut squash were tolerated, and sweet potatoes were a complete failure. I’ve decided feeding Anya is a little like that carnival game where you have a squirt gun and shoot water into the parted lips of a tiny clown head eight feet away. In both cases, it takes persistence, good aim, and the approval of the gods because the game is rigged so most of the stuff splashes out of the mouth anyway. 

Surprisingly, this recent focus on real food sparked a renewed interested in nursing for Anya. The girl who wouldn’t latch on anything is suddenly sucking my chin, my shoulder, and, when at the pool, her daddy’s hairy nipples. Even though we’d run this gamut before, I figured it couldn’t hurt to try it again. 

There are four major positions in which one can nurse: the cradle, the cross-cradle, the football, and reclined. Because Anya marches to the beat of a different drummer (the guy playing the trap set in Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”), she decided to create her own variations of the Big Four now that she’s nursing again. Here they are:

The Gold Digger: While nursing, Anya’s top hand is thrust into one or both of my nostrils. The climate in Washington has always been rough on my sinuses, so her excursions into my nasal cavities tend to be rather productive. Unfortunately, Anya runs her hand through her hair when she gets tired and since nursing makes her sleepy, at the end of fifteen minutes, she looks like the punchline of a dumb blonde joke (“Why is your hair green?” “It’s natural!”)

The Boxer: In this position, Anya takes her little fist and punches me repeatedly in the face while nursing contentedly. This position is not be confused with The Mike Tyson, in which Anya simply bites me and laughs her head off, or The Cat Fight, in which Anya pulls my hair and scratches me with her tiny, dagger-like fingernails.

The Dentist: In this position, Anya inserts her free hand into my mouth and checks for loose teeth. Occasionally, she also scrutinizes the health of my gums by scraping them with the aforementioned fingernails.

The natural question would be, why don’t I hold her hands still while she eats? The answer? Because the girl freaks out when her range of motion is impeded, even for a few seconds. So I go along with it. Plus, the green hair is kind of funny.