When babies are first born, they do five things: Eat, sleep, pee, poop and scream. Well, every once in a while they just sit there, but I'm not sure that counts as actually doing something.

After about a month, babies begin to smile for a reason other than gas. From then on, they keep adding other adorable tricks to their repertoire, so as to keep their parents's bragging from being utterly monotonous.

Most pediatricians recommend that babies start "experimenting" with solid foods at some point between four and six months of age. As regular readers know, my son Max is a big boy. His weight is--literally--off the charts, and his length (height) stands at about the 95th percentile. Any concerns his mother had about him getting enough breast milk at any particular feeding have long since been allayed. Our pediatrician told us we could start Max on solids any time after his three-month birthday.

But we waited, for reasons medical and emotional. The reason most babies need to wait for solids is to lower the risk of food allergies. The earlier anything other than breast milk is introduced into the diet (this does include formula, by the way), the more likely a child is to develop a physical aversion to various sorts of food. More importantly, Barbara didn't want to stop being Max's sole source of sustenance until the last moment possible. Not only understandable, but admirable.

Three weeks ago, we took the plunge and mixed up a bowl of rice cereal (the blandest food imaginable, so as to properly prepare young Max's digestive system). From the start, Max showed an amazing aptitude for eating solids. Most kids take about a week to stop pushing the cereal out of their mouths as soon as you put it in. No such problems with our kid. As long as the food makes it into his mouth, he sucks it right down his gullet.

As any parent will tell you, however, that "as long as the food makes it into his mouth" part is huge. Before Max's arrival, I often heard tales of parents and children "wearing" a meal. Childless me just dismissed such incidents as parents who didn't know how to control their kids.

As I learned not one minute after Max's birth, you don't control a baby. Just doesn't happen.

Max's special feeding mayhem is caused by his eagerness for the food. He lunges forward for the spoon and tries to jam it into his mouth with both hands. I can usually hold down one of his mitts, but the other inevitably alters the trajectory of the spoon, landing large quantities of cereal in his hair, eyes, cheeks, chin and up his nose. This, of course, is his plan. Once he figures out where a large deposit of cereal lies, he two-fists it into his mouth. Some of it, anyway. The rest kinda streams out of his hands, down his arms and all over the chair, floor and me.

Then came the day he figured out that the mother lode of cereal resides in the bowl. Once his eyes saw an empty spoon enter the bowl and leave with a full load, he knew just what to do. The next time I leaned in with the spoon, he went for the bowl with both hands. It flipped over his head (depositing a fair load in his hair) and landed upside-down on the floor.

That was the end of cereal for that day. Cleanup only took an hour.

You might think I'm complaining. I'm not. Because there is a miracle attendant to the advent of eating rice cereal: the great poop slowdown.

Rice is a very starchy grain. It doesn't have a whole lot of fiber, and in any case is much thicker than breast milk. So it makes sense that the three or four poops a day Max had been generating might be cut back a bit.

Max now poops once a week.

It's a big poop, mind you, and a hell of a lot stinkier and stickier than your usual breast milk kinda poop. We still use the same number of wipes, as this weekly poop requires about ten to get his butt mostly clean. Still, five minutes of nuclear waste disposal a week beats an hour a day of slime schlepping, hands down.

I can hear the Metamucil freaks out there screaming "You're doing irreparable damage to his colon!" Thing is, this lack of pooping is not a medical problem. He's not in any pain. His system is working just fine. And once he passes through the rice cereal phase and begins eating other more fibrous foods, he'll start pooping a lot more. Or, as our friends with older babies say, "Just wait until prunes!"

Hmm. Let's just say that right now we're not emotionally ready to get Max going on prunes. There's plenty of time for that.

Like, um, a few years or so.

Jon Worley took a bite of his son's rice cereal. The stuff tasted like liquid sand.