"It's starting to smell a little like danger in here, or heavily-fried food." -The Tick, The Tick

The New Boy develops a life long passion for eating everything in sight. I'm thinking we'll need to keep cattle when he's older so he can eat them whole.

Baby food is expensive, like Loch Ness Monster tenderloin grilled by FEMA over asteroid briquettes is expensive. Pricey, pricey stuff. When you add in the fact that Gerber’s has to ship this stuff in to Alaska in trucks that have people in the back shivering to add heat to the food so it doesn’t freeze, you can see one of the reasons that the costs mount. Normally, that wouldn’t bother me.

But we have The New Boy.

The New Boy is a bit over eight months old, but eats enough food, to single handedly feed Wyoming most nights. Formula? No, forget it. Not nearly enough nutrition. Formula plus rice? Nope, not enough to keep a belly full. Formula plus rocks? Nice and crunchy, but hard on the gums after a while.

We moved The New Boy to solid foods not long after we saw him gnawing the slats out of his crib in preparation (we assume) to wrestle down a dog and barbeque it over the wood stove. We started with the baby foods, you know, the pureed things (Teriyaki Broccoli and Applesauce Medley) that no self-respecting adult would eat. I asked The Mrs. to save some of the little jars so I could attach them with screws to the underside of the cabinets in my workshop. Within a week I had enough little jars to float a car driven by a Kennedy.

I knew then we had a bigger problem. The New Boy might soon eat every morsel of food in the house and then turn on us, or we were gonna go broke purchasing the ever-increasing Gerber’s food he demanded. When you add in the fact that Gerber’s has to ship this stuff in to Alaska in trucks that don’t let it freeze, you can see one of the reasons that the costs mount. We decided to take a more radical track. We’d try something no parent had ever thought of. We’d feed him the same stuff we eat.

Our first venture off the Gerber’s ranch was spaghetti. An eight month eating spaghetti, barehanded well, frankly it’s disgusting, and more than a bit frightening.

If you have a strong stomach, you might have seen Night of The Living Dead. Watching The New Boy in his nearly comatose, unthinking hunger made me recall fairly vividly the scenes from this movie. I think that George Romero studied babies to see how he wanted his zombies to act. Babies are like zombies:

They only grunt incoherently
They’re fixated on food
They can’t do calculus

The major difference is that zombies don’t grow up and ask for the car keys.

When The New Boy was done, he was covered in a fine pink patina of mashed spaghetti from head to toe. Some had, to his great joy, actually made it into his mouth. The primary beneficiaries of his bounty were the dogs, who formed a ring around The New Boy, and waited patiently for him to drop additional foodstuffs.

Since The Great Spaghetti Feast we’ve tried other foods. Cheerios are plenty tasty, but his young paws have a great degree of difficulty holding them and manipulating them so they actually end up in his gaping maw rather than as additional treats for dogs that haven’t (let’s be real) been pulling their weight around this place as it is.

We have, however, formulated a way to end the blossoming symbiotic relationship between The New Boy and his canine friends – bread. Bread is the staff of life. I saw that on a commercial once, so I’m certain that it must be true. Bread can be pulled into long strips that The New Boy can maneuver into his endless abyss and turn into a pasty saliva-sodden mass, from which he apparently enjoys some sustenance. The New Boy feeds himself with great concentration, rivaling even a grandmaster chess champion as he contemplates doing his taxes while juggling cats.

The one thing I’m sad about is now the dogs, which had been about to induct The New Boy into the Secret Canine Amiable Membership Protective Society (SCAMPS) now consider him, more or less, a piece of furniture again. Perhaps I should tie a strip of bacon around his wrist so he can pretend to pet them.