The omnivore vegetarian by Rhianon

[advert:mpu]Our baby loves to eat, yes sir he does! He’ll have a little lick and a nibble of anything in my hand, on my fork or left over on someone’s plate. He’s not to proud to consume the crumbs from his bigger brother and has developed a pretty efficient hoovering technique for those hard-to-reach corners of our tiny home. Avoid the sandpit before meal time – he loves a nice munch on sand, or even better, a tasty bit of gravel. Always with a huge grin on his face and a smack of the lips. We often change his nappy and find a nice mixture of poo, mud and grit. Cleans out his insides, right? Added fibre, no?

I should have suspected how this was going to pan out when we were playing with the insect domino set and he was making ‘yummmmmm!’ sounds at all the beetles. Now the weather’s improving those bugs had better beware – baby’s got a hunger on him, and he’s coming for you! Anything that moves, in fact, ends up wiggling frantically between his wee little fingers then gets popped quickly in his mouth before we can zoom to the rescue. ‘Mmmmmm’, he says, with a big grin. It's real life 'I'm a celebrity...'.

Of course the irony is that we’ve brought baby up painstakingly vegetarian, on a precocious and frankly bloody time consuming diet of quinoa flakes and lentils, which (I’m not kidding) he also loves. The Germans nod sagely when they see him scrabbling for bugs in the bushes, ‘protein!’, they say, ‘babies need protein!’ Grrrrr. Smile and nod, Rhianon, smile and nod.