Greetings from San Antonio, where we're once again visiting with family. And raiding boxes of Hayden's daddy's childhood memorabilia, which in and of itself is worth the price of a plane ticket, if you ask me. I'm a little too fascinated with David's baby photos, studying them with near-academic intensity as I try to pinpoint the origin of Hayden's features. Research Girl would be proud.

I still haven't figured out whose nose she has, or where she got that cleft chin from, but I did discover something else that was really interesting. I found baby pics of both David and his sister, Lynn, being fed rice cereal while they were still alarmingly small—weeks-old small.

The AAP currently recommends waiting until six months to start solids, though many pediatricians still go by the previous recommendation of four months. But weeks old? Sure enough, a passage in David's baby book confirmed that "he started cereal at about 1 month." This was 33 years ago, not all that long ago but apparently long enough. The times, they have a' changed.

I kept reading, and learned that "David nursed until he was 7 months, and most of his food was homemade using a blender." Some things, I was thrilled to discover, haven't really changed. But the mere fact that baby food recommendations have changed so much in just one generation has really piqued Research Girl's interest. So now I'm on a mission to find out just what else our moms and grandmoms were told to do for their babies.

Resources

• New Guidelines for Introducing Solid Foods to Avoid Development of Infant Allergies
• American Academy of Pediatrics