Crunchy.

I get Oliver's "developmental milestones" sent to me via email every month, and I usually just ignore them. I know he is doing well, so I usually just don't care. Today I was bored so I decided to read them. Per usual I was able to mentally check off everything on the list until I came to "able to pick up a small object, such as a raisin."

Now that, I didn't know if he could do that or not. We typically try to keep all raisin sized objects away from him. But, since it was bugging me and I wanted to know... I searched the house for something for him to try to pick up. I settled on breaking up a graham cracker into tiny pieces.

Lo and behold, he can do it! It is a stupid thing to be excited about, but I'm still proud of him nonetheless. First he was satisfied with picking up the graham pieces and crushing them, but then he wanted to eat them so I said... well, okay. Sounds good to me. Do it.

And he did. The look on his face was ridiculous. What? Food that crunches? FOOD DOESN'T CRUNCH! And then he bit it and his mouth went chomp chomp chomp and he declared it good. He now wants more. And more. He is a carb-aholic already.

I don't know why I was so surprised when he liked the graham cracker. He eats everything I put in front of him. Sweet potato, yams, green beans, peas, apples, pears, carrots - he likes them all. I gave him a taste of my mom's white chili last night and although he made a face, I bet he would have eaten more of it. He will happily suck on a lemon slice. He will gnaw on a pickle.  He enjoyed my sister's mango smoothie. He likes food. He lives to eat. Put it in front of him, and it will go into his mouth.

So, today I discovered two more ways in which my baby is like the family dog:

1. I can feed him the food from my plate that I don't like, so I can still get dessert.
2. Much like a dog gnawing a large bone, he tilts his head to the side and concentrates very hard on his food. Any pieces that fall out of his mouth are game for a second go. The crunch crunch crunch of graham cracker is not unlike the noise a dog makes while chewing hard kibble.

Like my baby, but hairier and less cute.