Orange

Legend has it that Julie's parents drove her and her sister Jen to the doctor because they were orange babies. It turned out the girls were not Oompa Loompas as their young parents perhaps feared.

The doctor said something like, "By chance, do these girls like carrots?" and the girls got a carrot-wild look in their eyes and started foaming at the mouth. When they realized he didn't have any carrots to offer them, they attacked him, gnashing their gums on his jugular vein. It took their parents plus three nurses to pull them off the poor man.

As he wiped the saliva from his neck and the sweat from his forehead, he explained that c-a-r-r-o-t-s (which he spelled this time, lest he be attacked again) had beta-c-a-r-o-t-e-n-e, which could turn you orange if you ate enough.

Okay, I got a little carried away there.

Lyla loves Gerber carrots, slurps them like a toothless Bugs Bunny, so we decided to make our own. Curiously, though, when we fed Lyla the carrots we had steamed, cooled, and puréed, she reacted as though we were actually feeding her puréed Oompa Loompas.




So what's the difference between Gerber carrots and real carrots? Are theirs like special free-range carrots or something? Maybe we should dump some sugar on ours.