When's my baby ready for real solid, solid foods?

This has been a question of mine for a few months now. Several friends with kids have been telling me that there just comes a day when their kid stopped wanting everything pureed and moved on to solid solids. I didn't want to hold Ada back so I kept trying new things and hoping that she didn't decided to move on right after I had just spent a mint on Gerber baby food jars. I tried to keep a low inventory just in case, which is a tough challenge as babies seem to be bottomless pits at this stage and predicting how much she'd need was tough. And friends made it sound like "suddenly, out of the blue, he stopped eating pureed stuff all together." What? Then what would I do with all of these jars of sweet potatoes and bananas and oatmeal? I'm not going to eat that crap.

Here I was in a tizzy for no reason. I thought something along the lines of "once you go solid, you never go back." Not the case at all, for Ada at least. Not only is she slow to start walking, which my Doctoress theorizes is due to her amazonianess, she's also one of the later movers to solid foods. Seeing how messy it is for her to feed herself solids, I don't really have any problem with this fact. No, really. I'm okay with spending a bit more time feeding her from the jar if it saves me from giving her 20 baths a day.

Then one day, it happened. I gave her a little bit of scrambled egg, and she inhaled it. Her two little hands couldn't shovel it into her mouth fast enough. Then next day, it was a pancake. Now, it's pretty much anything she can get her hands on. But she's still okay with things that are pureed and things that come out of a jar, thankfully. It turns out that she might be more of a gradual changer instead of a "duh mom, that's like, so yesterday." I see this as a blessing really as I've never been up on the times. I mean, just yesterday I bought a new nail polish that is for the fall 08 season. We are rounding the corner into spring of 09 but I just didn't like the spring 09 color as well as I like the 08 tint. What can I say?

Moral of the story: The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.