We gave Annalie her first taste of mashed banana the day she turned six months old. She sucked on the spoon, looked at us with an expression that said, “You mean that stuff you guys have been putting in your mouths all this time tastes like THIS and you haven’t been sharing!?” then grabbed the spoon from me and tried to shove the whole thing into her mouth.

I know that with babies you’re supposed to only offer them one food at a time to make sure they aren’t allergic to anything, and I sort of did that at first. Then I got lazy and bored and before long Annalie was happily eating a decent array of fruits, vegetables, grains, and even meat. She often ate whatever we were eating, mashed up.

Once when Annalie was about eight months old and we were eating at Wild Noodles, Troy had an enchilada dish that was rather spicy. Annalie ignored her Cheerios and kept trying to grab food from his dish. We told her it was hot and she wouldn’t like it. Then we gave her a little bite, expecting her to make funny faces. Instead, she smacked her lips and opened her mouth for more. In her first year of life she also regularly ate pieces of tofu from my hot-and-sour soup, and enjoyed sucking on dill pickles.

As I was unpacking bags and putting groceries away one day when Annalie was about 18 months old, she suddenly started saying, “Ba-COB-ba-cob, ba-COB-ba-cob!” and pointing at something on the counter. We tried to figure out what she wanted—sippy cup? goldfish crackers?—and finally realized she was pointing at the box of store-brand zip-lock bags. I asked if she was pointing at the bags, and she shook her head, pointed again, and said more urgently, “Mama, BA.COB.BA.COB.”

That’s when we noticed the picture on the front of the box: a zip-lock bag with pieces of broccoli in it. I tentatively asked, “Broccoli?” and Annalie nodded her head and beamed. “You…want some broccoli for a snack?”

“Yesss! Ba-COB-ba-cob!”

We had always fed Annalie broccoli, but up to that point had no idea she loved it so much. I bemusedly microwaved a dish of frozen broccoli while Annalie danced around happily, singing, “Ba-COB-ba-cob, mmm-mmm-mmm!” Troy set her up in her chair at the table as I cut the broccoli into small pieces. She ate every last bite and asked for more. “Meeee ba-cob-ba-cob?” (She used to fuse “more” and “please” into one word which was so cute it killed us.)

Annalie has gotten a little pickier about food as a preschooler, but I think that probably has more to do with asserting control over her world than with how foods taste. Often when she refuses to eat something and we encourage her to take just one bite, she’ll do so reluctantly but then a smile will spread across her face and she’ll exclaim, “Hey, I do like it! It’s good!” And pickiness is relative. She still loves broccoli, green beans, chickpeas, rice and beans, chili, curry, tomato soup, meatballs, carrots, celery, boiled eggs, all kinds of yogurt, cheddar cheese, gouda cheese, parmesan cheese, mashed potatoes, and almost any kind of fruit. She’s been known to pass up ice cream and cake for blueberries, strawberries, and watermelon.

We went to Souplantation for dinner the other night and Annalie was walking down the salad bar saying things like, “Ooh, carrots! I better make sure I get lots of garbanzo beans. Can you help me get some peas and corn, please? Cucumbers, yum!” Then when we went to the soup bar, Annalie chose to try the Morroccan Garbanzo and Lentil Bean soup for the first time and loved it.

(Are you hating us and our vegetable-eating kid yet? Would it make you feel better if I told you that Annalie has always fought sleep and that putting her to bed still involves an elaborate ritual of bath, reading books, telling stories, prayers, singing songs, and rocking? It actually takes MUCH less time now to put her to bed than it used to. We used to spend the better part of two hours every night putting her back to bed over and over and over again. I can’t wait for her to really start reading, so I can tell her, “Here’s your flashlight. Read in bed till you fall asleep!”)

I am constantly amazed by her love of so many different kinds of foods, and I know what a blessing it is. I have friends who have to struggle at every meal to get their kids to eat. I have a lot of sympathy for them because I used to be one of those kids.

I was the pickiest eater imaginable as a kid. I didn’t like broccoli at all till I was in my 20s. When I was a kid I wanted to eat something besides iceberg lettuce and PB&Js and plain white rice and Cheerios. But many foods had a texture or smell or color that made me gag.

I outgrew my aversions and learned to love onions, cauliflower, butternut squash, marinara sauce, garlic, and all the hundreds of other flavors I couldn’t imagine life without now. At four and a half years old Annalie already likes all those foods. I remember mealtimes when I was a child often being a big struggle. With Annalie mealtimes are a genuine delight. For that, I humbly give thanks.

My laptop is in a coma.

I have high hopes that it is not yet dead, but it definitely went kablooey this afternoon and no amount of coaxing from me has been able to resuscitate it.

The timing was impeccable. The 1-year warranty expired a couple of weeks ago. Annalie and I are leaving town with my parents Thursday morning and Troy (our Resident Computer Geek) is gone and doesn’t get home till Thursday afternoon.

At first, I panicked a little bit. Then I thought, Hmm, it might be kinda freeing to not have a laptop to worry about while I’m traveling. My mom does have a decent PC with a high-speed internet connection, so it’s not like I’d be living in 1992 while I’m in Omaha—more like 2006, at the worst. The main inconvenience is that my mom’s computer doesn’t have a decent photo-editing program on it. But now that I have the Nikon D40 that’s not as much of an issue. It’s such a fancy-schmancy camera that the photos I take with it don’t require much editing.

I’ve decided to just take the laptop’s coma in stride. Troy can probably fix it. Even if he can’t, he was pretty sure from what I described to him in an email that it’s not the hard drive that’s fried. We should be able to hook that up to another computer and get photos and stuff off it.

Right now I am using the PC that we still have but have barely used since we became a two-laptop family last year. It’s got old photos on its hard drive from 2001-2007. I figured as long as I was using an old machine, I’d throw some old photos up here, just for fun.

I think I’ve mentioned somewhere before that we used to take photos of Annalie on her pink kitty quilt, so we could see how she had grown from month to month. We only did that a few times. We did better with the teddy bear pictures.

When Annalie was born, Troy’s Aunt Pauline send her a knitted teddy bear with a pink sweater bearing her initials. We took a picture of her next to that bear every month (except for October 2004, when we forgot) for the first year of her life. After Annalie’s first birthday, I made a little photo album on Snapfish and gave copies to all the grandparents and Pauline.

Anyway, if you don’t hear from me much in the next few days, now you know why. I’m laptop-less for a while. But I’m OK with that.

UPDATE: I found another photo of Annalie with the bear!

You will find these photos, along with more detailed notes on each one, in the photoset Annalie and the Bear on Flickr.

Troy and I were engaged on October 9, 1995. It’s kind of a funny story.

We met in August 1994, during Resident Assistant training. We had both ended long-term relationships right before we met, and neither of us were in a hurry to start dating someone new. Not that we considered each other potential dating material, because we didn’t. We were just co-workers and friends at first. As fall turned to winter we got to know each other better and became good friends. We spent so much time together that our co-workers and friends started asking us, “Are you guys dating?”

The first few times we were asked that question, we laughed about how people saw a guy and girl together and automatically assumed they must be romantically involved. After the sixth or seventh person asked us we said, Hmm, why does everyone keep asking us that? We decided that maybe we’d be missing out on something really great if we didn’t at least give it a try. So we shifted our paradigm and started dating. Three weeks later we knew we would eventually get married. It wasn’t any grand gesture or realization, it was just a quiet knowledge that we were supposed to be together, a sense of rightness.

Troy graduated in May 1995 and was commissioned as a Navy officer. He stayed in Lincoln that summer, working at the ROTC unit and spending as much time with me as we could manage. At the end of July he drove off to Athens, Georgia, where he would be a student at the Navy Supply School for six months. Saying good-bye to him was one of the hardest things I’d ever done, and that initial period of living in different states remains the most difficult separation we’ve endured in our 14 years of knowing each other.

When I went to visit Troy over Columbus Day weekend in October, we weren’t planning to get engaged. We thought maybe we’d get engaged at Christmas, and while I was there we went looking at rings so Troy could get an idea of what I liked. At one small jewelry store the owner was very friendly and spent a long time talking to us, asking us questions about where we were from, how long we’d known each other, etc. In the course of conversation we mentioned that I was there visiting for the weekend and would be going home the next day.

There was a ring at that store that I liked very much. Troy decided to go ahead and buy it so he’d have it when he decided the time was right to propose. That was perfectly all right with me; I knew we’d get engaged eventually and wasn’t in a big hurry. But the jeweler was astonished that I didn’t want to take the ring back to Nebraska with me. He told us he could have the ring resized and ready to pick up by the next day, if we changed our minds. We assured him that wasn’t necessary, thanked him for all his help, and said good-bye.

Back at Troy’s apartment we got to talking about it and decided that maybe…yeah, maybe we did want to get engaged now! Troy called up the jewelry store and asked them to have the ring ready the next day. Then we called our parents to tell them we were officially engaged. They were all happy and unsurprised, which we thought was funny. They’d all seen it coming, even though we hadn’t. That was going to be a common theme in the days and weeks to come when we shared the news with friends and family.

The next day we stopped by the store to pick up the ring on our way to the airport in Atlanta. When we got back to the car, I said to Troy, “You do realize that a jeweler talked us into getting engaged, don’t you?” We both cracked up, Troy put the ring on my finger, and we drove happily to the airport. It wasn’t till later that we realized we were so busy laughing that Troy never officially proposed, but it was okay. Laughing together was, and still is, sort of a defining element of our relationship. We figured it was fitting that our engagement started not with a proposal but with laughter.