The Great Carrots Incident of 2001
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It has come to my attention that I have never told my pureed carrots baby food story. I don’t really know why. I mean, the story’s around 19 years old. You’d think I would have told this story by now. Amazingly enough, I hadn’t.
This is a travesty. It must be changed.
This whole thing came to a head because of a video that Mihret, Christy, and I made and published on Mihret’s YouTube channel. What’s that? You didn’t know she has a YouTube channel? Well, she does. We started it a few months ago. The channel’s called Magical Mihret. And you should go subscribe. Seriously. Subscribe. Right now.
Go ahead. I’ll wait. She’ll love it if you subscribe.
The Baby Food CHALLENGE
So we shot this video, the Baby Food CHALLENGE, for Mihret’s channel. She’d been begging to do this video for a while now. We finally agreed. Christy brought home some baby food and we set up everything for our show. Here’s what happened…
I know. Fun, right? Well, it’s fun to watch, anyway.
You probably didn’t notice, but there’s a brief moment of genuine hesitation when it came to eating those carrots. It was right around the 1:22 mark. I paused for that oh-so-brief second because I thought, “Uh oh. This is the first time I’ve had baby food carrots since the Great Carrots Incident of 2001. What if I get sick when I try these carrots?” That would certainly make for some must-see-YouTube right there. Am I right? You know I am.
Fortunately, y’all missed out. I didn’t toss my carrots.
The Great Carrots Incident of 2001
Aiden loves reminding me of this story, so I’m a little surprised that I hadn’t shared it. It doesn’t look like I have. But even if I had already told the story, I’m sure it’s worth sharing again.
I imagine Aiden was between six and eight months old. I could be wrong. But this was definitely before Aly was born. I was stretched out on my back in the TV room and he had scooted over to me. I began was lifting him up, kind of like I was bench pressing him.
As I held him up in the air, he would just cackle and cackle and cackle. He thought it was the greatest thing ever. Of course, this made me laugh. So I did it more. And that made him laugh more.
Up, down. Up, down. I lifted him up several times and we laughed the whole time. They were huge belly laughs that take over your whole face. We were having a moment. A father-son bonding moment.
Then…I heard it…
Hiccup…
Rookie mistake
You see, I should have thought things through. I should have realized that Christy had just fed Aiden a jar of baby food. I should have known what was going to happen next. But I didn’t.
It was a rookie mistake. And I never made it again.
You see, I found out pretty quick what, exactly, Christy had been feeding Aiden. His head was directly above mine. I was laughing along with him when he made that fateful hiccup.
As I’m sure you’ve figured out by now, I found out pretty quick that he’d been eating pureed carrots because…well…I could taste them!
That’s right.
Those pureed carrots immediately followed that hiccup. And those pureed carrots landed squarely in my mouth.
I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to sit up and spit it all out. But I had my kid dangling over me, just laughing away. He was completely oblivious to what had happened. I couldn’t drop him. That was certain. But I couldn’t easily put him down, either. If I rolled over, I’d be rolling into the spit up pureed carrots. And the only thing that could make having your kid spit up his pureed carrots into your mouth is to then roll into more of his spit up carrots.
It was quite the predicament. I don’t know how, but I did eventually find myself sitting up and successfully spitting out the residual spit up carrots. Aiden was safely on the floor, just cackling away. Still oblivious to what had happened.
Years later
Obviously, Aiden doesn’t remember The Great Carrots Incident of 2001. But he sure likes to tell people about it – even 19 years later. Honestly? I probably would, too. How often do you get to say that you spit a stream of pureed carrots into your dad’s mouth?
All of this came flashing back to me as that spoon of pureed carrots stared me in the face. It was just for a split second, but it made me think twice about whether I was really going to eat those carrots or not. In the end, everything turned out just fine. But it was touch-and-go for a moment. And now you understand why.
Oh, the things we’ll do for our kids.
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