Swipe the chin.

The other day I was feeding Little L some yogurt and also making a cup of tea, feeding the dog, cooking the older kid's lunch and talking on the phone. G saw that I was struggling to do everything at the same time and gamely offered to feed Little L for me... this wasn't so much for my benefit really, more for her own entertainment, but I never turn down the offer of help. Just ask my sister in law who once politely asked what she could do to help while I was prepping dinner - as a courtesy of course, no one really expects any response other than "oh just pour some wine and relax" - and was hit with a laundry list of chores... including laundry.

So I handed G the yogurt bowl and baby spoon and she started airplaning bites to Little L. I reminded her to give little bites, but for some reason yogurt was still getting everywhere. I watched a little more closely and then remembered...

When G was a baby she went to Miss Lynn's while I worked. I had started her on solids when she was 4 months old; at the time this was the age at which you introduced rice cereal mixed with a good amount of breastmilk to make it nice and watery. Being first time parents and wanting to do everything correctly, we followed our pediatrician's advice and made the concoction, then spoon fed it to our wee 4 month old who wasn't even sitting up unsupported yet. After three days of this, we gave up. It was too much work, too much breastmilk to waste and too much mess. Plus, it seemed silly to force a spoon into G's tiny little mouth when she wasn't even able to sit up yet. When we revisited solids a few months later we went straight to stage 2 jarred food.

Grace was already at Miss Lynn's house by this time, and I noticed that when I picked her up in the afternoons, she was always fairly clean. There were never any sweet potato stains lingering on her onesie from where they had evaded the bib at lunchtime, and she never had the remains of yogurt crusted in her hair. I marveled at Miss Lynn's baby feeding expertise, and one day I finally asked her how she did it.

"Small bites. Swipe the chin." was her answer.

Swipe the chin!! Collect all the left over food that didn't quite make it in the first time with the spoon and pop it back in the baby's mouth before she had a chance to smear it all over the place.

Swipe the chin. It is one of those things that you just pick up from being around other parents and their babies, like burping the baby on your lap while rocking her back and forth, or putting the diapers on backwards when they learn to take them off themselves during naptime. It's so simple, so obvious, yet so not. And here I'd been dabbing at her face with the bib after every bite.

So, as I watched G making a mess with Little L and the yogurt, I almost told her to swipe the chin. Then I pictured what would happen when G tried that maneuver ("Sit still baby, I need to get your chin!" as Little L twists and cries because her entire face is getting poked with the spoon) and decided I'd make sure to tell her later... like when she has better fine motor skills and her own baby to wrangle.