My husband and I both thought we were going to be grossed out when Nora started solid foods, a couple of weeks before she reached the age of six months. Instead, we found ourselves taking picture after picture as she sat up eagerly in her little booster seat and gaped for the spoon like a big-eyed baby bird. It wasn't until very recently, after about a month of solids feeding, that things got seriously yucky; that's when she discovered that she could wield the spoon herself or grab globs of cereal and spread it all over her tray, as if she were doing some kind of high-concept performance art.

She's actually not bad with the spoon, sticking it into her mouth right-way in well over half the time and never gagging herself yet, but there is of course the inevitable inadvertent flinging of food and some spoon-dropping. That's not yet a game, but when I bent down to pick up the spoon and she saw just how funny it was to grab a hank of my hair with her gummy, goopy hands it seemed likely to become one right quick.

This new and messy development notwithstanding, solid foods have been a smash hit in our house. Rice cereal was instantly beloved; applesauce, pears, pumpkin, apricots, mango, carrots, peas, bananas, avocados, and prunes have all been accepted with varying degrees of enthusiasm, but usually quite a lot. We have made an awful lot of trips to our local natural-foods co-op for the pricey little boxes of organic baby cereal, because she goes through a box in a matter of days. I've been cooking up little batches of fruits and vegetables, pureeing them in the food processor or grinding up little bits at a time in the cute little 1970s-vintage Happy Baby food grinder that my mom saved from my own babyhood. So far, I've been making her food, because that's the kind of crazy I like to drive myself.

Well, I haven't been making quite all the food myself. There's the formula, which we bought for the first time a few weeks ago. I'm still breastfeeding, I hasten to add (worried that others will judge me, and judging myself more than anyone else would), but our kind, trusted pediatrician told us in no uncertain terms to mix up Nora's cereal with formula. I was having trouble pumping enough milk to mix with the cereal, and at her six-month appointment Nora was small—really small. As in, 10th percentile small, when at two months she was in the 50th and at four months in the 25th.

We thought she would have gained like gangbusters, especially given her adorable chubbiness and how fast she took to solids—this is clearly not a baby with an eating problem, we thought—but instead, in two months she'd gained a scant pound. Indeed, she was only up five pounds from her largish birth weight. The doctor, with a studied air of not being concerned yet, said that many breastfed babies have a dip on the growth charts around six months of age, as they get more and more distracted while eating. (I can vouch for that; Nora sometimes seems to spend more time craning her neck around to look at her crib for the thousandth time than she does eating). We were then gently cautioned not to let the baby fall off the growth chart, to step up the breastfeeding, and also to go get some formula for that cereal. My face obviously betrayed my reaction to this idea. "Formula is not evil," said the doctor, with a wry smile.

I managed not to cry until we got home. I know there's nothing wrong with formula. It's the best choice for many parents, babies fed entirely on formula do just fine (I should know; I was formula-fed myself), and so on and so forth. Plus, I felt like I was spending half the time I wasn't actually feeding Nora pumping and pumping and pumping, all for very, very scanty rewards. Mixing her cereal with formula would give her much-needed calories, would be vastly easier for me, and would also mean we had formula around just in case I ever happened to be unable to breastfeed her for some reason or another. It was the obvious solution, and I felt like I had failed my baby in some horrible way.

I knew exactly how ridiculous I was being even as I teared up when I saw the can of formula sitting on our pantry shelf. (We have open shelving in the kitchen, but I neurotically put the formula out of sight, behind closed doors in the pantry on the service porch, until my husband protested at the inconvenience.) Had a friend been in my position—worried that her baby wasn't gaining weight well and exhausted and feeling inadequate from pumping—I would of course have encouraged her to use formula without a second thought. In fact, I have dispensed this very advice to the very few mothers I know whose babies are little and who've struggled with feeding. For some reason, giant, fast-growing babies are overrepresented among my friends and acquaintances.

Honestly, I thought I'd have one too. I was always a giant baby, over ten pounds at birth, and bigger as a kid and an adult. I assumed my child would take after me from the get-go by putting on weight fast and keeping it on, but it seems babies have all kinds of ways of being surprising. Nora took to breastfeeding well, but she has always been a quick feeder and a slow gainer. Still, I had a secret pride in continuing to nurture her alone, just me. I pumped milk (somehow that worked better earlier on) for bottles, which she also took happily from my husband, but we hadn't supplemented at all with formula. Her smallness didn't seem like a problem until she went precipitously down near the bottom of the charts. As an aside, it's odd how early body-image bias starts; probably if she had been a boy, everyone would have been more concerned about her smallness, or attached more negative labels to it. As it is, she's been called dainty and petite and feminine and perfectly proportioned, rather than just small or puny or undergrown or something like that.

It was obvious, but hard to admit to myself, that my own ego was deeply bound up in my initial reluctance to supplement even Nora's cereal with formula. I had been Mama, the source of all nourishment and good things, and I wanted to keep hold of being that all-important, just as much as I wanted to be able to brag (even if I only did it secretly and to myself) that Nora never, never had formula. Well, so much for that. What is parenting if not learning to subordinate the wants of one's own ego to the needs of one's child? Now I'm just one part of Nora's smorgasbord. Soon, all her nourishment will be coming at one remove from me, even though I'll still be essential to providing food for my daughter for many years—just in different ways. That's the way I want it to be, and I'm glad to say that Nora seems to have to been packing on the ounces much more quickly in the last few weeks. But I still had to get over my feeling of disappointment in myself before I could really accept that little cylinder of yellowish powder that now sits out in plain view on my kitchen shelf.