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Holden finished his first triathlon last weekend - twice - by crossing in arms with Alec (up in arms, judging by the screaming) and in a stroller with me, Amanda, and Olivia from our relay team.

Can you believe we don’t have any pictures of that?!

Other month 5 highlights include Holden meeting baby Norah, rolling to his tummy and getting stuck there (over and over during naps and in the middle of the night), dabbling in rice cereal, enduring his first runny nose, and visiting the Berkeley art museum.

He’s such a busy guy, when did he find time to train?

Wayne, via Whitney, just sent us a very interesting news piece at CalorieLab about baby feeding myths and obesity. I was really surprised to read that our western notions of starting kids off with bland foods in the name of health is probably bunk, but actually the debunking makese a lot of sense. Heather and I have started feeding Holden a little bit of rice cereal now and then so he can get used to eating “solid” food when the time comes. Heather was just saying the other day that she wanted to try some other foods on him but I was skeptical that it was such a good idea. I want him to develop a healthy relationship with food, and enjoy a variety of flavors… but I also was thinking that we had to start slow and ease into these flavors. If anything, I’m happy to be proven wrong if it is better for him!

The other particularly interesting article on the site was about “Fake Food Allergies”. This is something that has been nagging me since we started hearing all the warnings about kids and allergies. The warnings we’d hear about usually involved not feeding your kid one food or another before they could do long division because they might develop an allergy. According to the article, about 80% of “allergies” that kids have (likely as told to them by their parents) are simply not real! Our culture of fear has created a nation (or two.. the study was in the UK) of hypochondriac parents. Its like the folks who think they are allergic to milk when in fact they probably have a mild case of lactose intolerance. I always wondered how we had evolved to this point and still maintained such severe reactions to something as life-giving as food.

The good news for us as parents: we can feed Holden a greater variety of foods earlier, and revel in the variety of foods on his face.