La Vida Familia: Don't Take That Picture, Lady!

Lila and I went to the mat over dinner tonight, as she employed a new strategy: attack early and often. It started badly with her appetizer, cheese and crackers - or, more specifically, laughing cow cheese spread on her tiny Elmo-faced organic crackers - which she took one look at and threw on the floor. "Try one," I implored. She licked the cheese off the next one, and threw the cracker on the ground. After that she would only take the cheese off my finger directly into her mouth. But no crackers! Offense was taken!

We moved on to the main course. I freeze little Lila-sized portions of pureed fresh vegetables, so I defrosted some broccoli, some turnips, and I had some sweet potato in the fridge. Mixed them up with some oatmeal (for the iron), milk and flax seed. It's lumpy and kind of ugly to look at, but she usually eats it without complaint. Today, with the first spoonful she was swatting it out of her face, demanding her own spoon, and flicking what she could get in her hands back on me. At one point she couldn't be bothered to eat because she was too busy scraping dinner off her palms to try to get as much broccoli pulp under her fingernails as possible. For the first time when it was all over I didn't clean her up at her chair - I just whisked her straight to the tub and hosed her down from head to foot.

And so she won this battle, but the war wages on.

When I took these pictures, I liked how she looked like a mobster trying to slip out the back of the police station.