The Snarfle

Finally a post dedicated to my delicious nine-month old baby girl. She's taken to eating in a big way and pretty much spends most of her free-time inhaling food. Even when I just leave her on the kitchen floor while I'm making dinner, she finds her way to the dining room and then swims around the floor looking for fallen cheerios, dinner chunks, orange peel bits, what have you. And then she eats them. It's kind of like having a dog. Clearly she is a second child. I did recently switch to Method brand floor cleaner (all-natural) so she wouldn't be ingesting toxic cleaning fluid residue while eating off the floor. And all of the sockets are covered. Beyond that I pretty much throw caution to the wind.

And we also know she's a second child because she has a permanent cold/runny nose. The thing is a faucet. I can remember maybe three days in the last six months when she didn't have a slimy pool in the cleft above her lip. Nasty.

Which brings me to one of my favorite things. Where is she going with this? Well, she makes this amazing noise when she eats - the combination of newly acquired chewing skills and post nasal drip. She kind of hums while she gums up her food and you can hear the gunk in her nose rattling around as she tries to breathe all the while. It's music. Equal parts of phlegm, saliva (did I mention she's teething), food (beets are her favorite these days) and joy. I call it the SNARFLE and hearing it makes me seriously happy.

And don't even get me started on her pincer grab. Such precision! Such focus! Such resolve! There's not a cheerio within a ten foot radius that's safe from the girl I affectionately refer to as "the claw".