Basking in the glow of his constant adoration.

I took Eliot to the pediatrician's office today for a follow-up visit for his pnemonia (he's feeling much better). And the doctor said that he's getting too many yellow vegetables, he's turning orange, too much beta carotene, lay off the baby food and start giving him mostly table food. Except that she said it in a thick Eastern European accent. When she says his name, it sounds like "eel-e-aught," with the stress on the first syllable. And she mentioned that it would be a good idea to keep him out of public places with a lot of germ-infested people, because his lung tissue is still healing and if he gets another cold, there's a good chance that it will settle in the same place.

So the basic message was, feed him real food, but don't go to the grocery store. Hmmm...
This would not be a problem if I were a normal person, with something other than ketchup and beer in her refrigerator.

I had a feeling that neither ketchup nor beer was what the doctor had in mind when she said "table food."

Now, please understand that we DO have other food sources in the house. We have a deep freezer full, and I mean FULL of cow and pig meat. But I have no idea what one does with cow and pig meat. It's all divided up into various sized chunks, wrapped in white butcher's paper, and labelled with words like "chop" and "round." It scares me.

We also nearly always have leftover pizza, and frozen Lean Cuisine meals that I sometimes have for lunch, only it takes about three of them to fill me up.

So still, no real options for a 10.5 month-old-boy.

In the end, I decided on toasted cheese. I can handle toasted cheese, and babies can eat toasted cheese, right? If I cut the crusts off? (Lord, my world was so much easier when the kid just drank milk. Where did those days go?)

The cool thing about taking care of Eliot is, that no matter how totally clueless I am, he really doesn't notice. The kid thinks I am AWESOME. He thinks my *&%! smells like roses and I can do no wrong. He thinks everything I do is absolutely fabulous (unless what I'm doing is trying to get him to go to bed). This boy loves, loves, loves his momma. So when I presented him with a toasted cheese sandwich for lunch, he looked at it, looked at me, popped a bite in his mouth...

and then grinned up at me with such a shining smile, it was as if his face was saying, "You are the best momma in the world for preparing such a delicacy for me! What have I done to deserve such delicious goodness? I LOVE TOASTED CHEESE!!!! I LOVE toasted cheese and I LOVE my MOM!!!!!"

It doesn't get any better than that.

If only I could find a way to store up all this adoration and save it for his teenage years, when I will no doubt cease to be AWESOME and become a dog turd instead...