Wishing there were a manual

It bugged me to no end, when I was pregnant, to hear people say things like, You don't know what you're in for... they don't come with a manual, you know. I knew not to expect raising a baby to be easy but I also knew that if every moron out there could have a kid, then so could I (and I also knew not to expect a 120-page instruction booklet to fall out of my vagina along with the kid. That has to be the worst, most cliched, not-funny line for new parents, ever.) To all those misty-eyed mothers-to-be who said things like, It's not the delivery I'm afraid of... it's what happens when I take the baby home, I was more than willing to admit that the delivery scared the bejeesus out of me, but that I was sure that from that point on we'd be able to figure things out. This has more or less proven to be true over the past six months. Liam is not yet able to tell us how we've scarred him for life and that day may well come, but I think kids are, in general, pretty resilient, and even if we've screwed up along the way he has (so far) been very forgiving.

So I don't know why the whole issue of his eating has me freaked out. Years ago I swore I would never want to breastfeed, but now that I've done it it's hard to shake the feeling that anything else I give him is wrong, wrong, wrong. The WHO and every pediatric society you can think of recommend nothing but breast milk for the first six months, and would you believe that I am now second guessing having started Liam on cereal a mere handful of days before that? Maybe I should have waited for the calendar to roll over, after all. (He was up multiple times last night, so it doesn't seem to be helping him sleep through after all.) And nobody tells you how much or how often to feed them. We started with once a day and now I'm feeding him twice a day, breakfast and dinner, so that his mealtimes coincide with ours and make us all feel like one big happy family. Sometimes he eats a little, sometimes a lot. I don't care too much about that, and I know not to push it for fear of making the whole experience miserable for him and actually moulding him into a picky eater. I suppose this is where that 'mother knows best' thing kicks in and I am actually supposed to craft an answer, but that's a weird feeling to have for someone who has always looked up or calculated or otherwise found the one and only right answer. I have never had the liberty of just inventing it before.

I realize this obsessing over something that probably has plenty of leeway makes me sound like a nutcase, but did you know that there are specific rules about what you are and are not allowed to feed the swans and ducks in Stratford? I kid you not. That's not to say that the rules are always followed (especially when one is trying to clean out one's fridge/freezer prior to an extended trip) but they are there and you'd think they're there for a reason. If there's a right and a wrong for a duck, how can there not be for a human?

Liam doesn't seem to be enjoying the cereal - the way he screws up his face with every mouthful tells me so. Should I start him on a different kind of cereal? Should I slip him a teething biscuit? Can I go straight to the veggies? Can I go straight to the pizza? OK, so I know the answer to at least one of these questions, and I do honestly believe that he has the insides of a billy goat that will be able to handle whatever we put in him - but I am still agonizing over this.