At 6:30 on Saturday morning, Gracie comes running into the living room where I am sleeping.  "Mama, Mama!  The animals are awake!  The animals are awake!"  I open one eye and look over at Abbie, sacked out in her swing, finally, after being awake for most of the wee hours of the morning, hacking up at least one of her lungs.  Gracie starts pulling on my pajama top - "The animals - they're AWAKE!"  Well, at least one of them is.  Then I remember that she's not talking about her sister and herself.  She's talking about the animals at the zoo.  Steve and I told her on Friday that we were going to zoo - she was so excited that she wanted to go right then.  We convinced her that it was dark outside and the animals were sleeping and we'd have to wait until they woke up the next morning.  Thus, the 6:30 a.m. wake-up call about the animals no longer being asleep.  "We're going to go and feed the giraffes!"  Gracie is beyond excited and I'm convinced that if she could reach the keys, she would have simply driven herself to the zoo and waited in the parking lot until the gates opened.  "Yes, we're going to go and feed the giraffes"  I told her, "but first we have to feed Abbie!" 

"Milkie?"  asks Gracie. 

"Yes, she's going to have her milk, but then she gets cereal for the first time!"  Gracie's eyes are wide - she's obviously more interested in this cereal concept than her baby sister, who is still peacefully swinging away.  But, the time has come.  Abigail will be six months old next Tuesday, and she's starting to seem not quite satisfied by her breast milk-only diet.  Her daycare teachers seem to think that if she starts cereal, she won't need quite so much milk at daycare.  Which would be a great relief for me, since I'm pumping five to six times a day to keep up with the amount of milk that she's drinking the eight hours a day that she's away from me. 

So, once Abbie finally woke up and had her morning milk snack, we tried her out on rice cereal.  The deal we have at our house is, since I get to feed the kids their first meal (via breast milk), Steve gets to feed them their first non-milk meal.  Of course, I kind of lost out on that deal with Abigail, since I didn't get to feed breastfeed her for five days because of her NICU stay.  But, maybe because of that, I've been more of a breast milk nut with her.  So, since she came home from the hospital, she's never had formula, and except for daycare, she's rarely had a bottle, so Steve hasn't had the same opportunities to feed her that he did with Gracie.  So, I agreed to let him give her the first spoonful of cereal.  Of course, he only got to give her two spoonfuls, and then Gracie wanted to try.  I think the overall verdict from Abbie on the cereal deal was she could take it or leave it.  She ate several bites, but not with a whole lot of enthusiasm.  Kind of like how I feel when I eat oatmeal without butter and honey.  It's okay, but not my favorite thing.  And I think that rice cereal probably has less flavor that cardboard.  But at least she's on the road head to delicious things like mashed bananas and blueberry buckle.  Here's a picture of Abbie after her first taste of cereal:

Oops!  I got the pictures mixed up - those messy faces look so much alike!  That was a picture of a camel at the zoo after he ate his cereal! Here's the real picture of my girl:


After the cereal escapade, Gracie got her wish and we headed off to the zoo.  She's tell you that she fed the giraffes, but what she actually did was stand beside her daddy and shriek in mock terror while he fed them.