I have to face the facts. I was timid and, um, lazy when it came to introducing new foods to Eva. Shouldn’t be that big of a deal, right? But when you’ve worked with food for the majority of your professional life, it’s easy to over-think it and create yet another source of mommy guilt. (Great.)

Eva liked mashed bananas, so I was happy to serve them as breakfast or an occasional on-the-go snack. And she’d eat anything mixed with greek yogurt, which was great for hiding pureed peas. (Jessica Seinfeld was clearly onto something.) I read about spices and different cooking methods on all sorts of baby food blogs. I’d add ground cinnamon to a mashed banana and greek yogurt mixture, and I’d occasionally puree a big batch of steamed zucchini, serving it for a few days straight, with some single-portion amounts set aside to freeze for back-up meals.

So when my husband’s college roommate and his family came to stay with us at our home upstate, I found myself being schooled by another mom when it came to making baby food. She’d buy a grass-fed New York strip steak and puree it with sautéed onions and call it baby food. I tried it, and no joke, it reminded me more of a low-fat pate or meat spread (read: tasty!). The only thing that separated it from something I’d eat myself was that it wasn’t seasoned with salt and she used very little fat during its preparation. Granted, her daughter was a few months older than Eva, but still, the difference between us on the baby food spectrum was closer to light years than months. I felt like I’d stalled at what food marketing teams call Stage 1. The other mom was at Stage 3 with honors.

And with their visit came the point where everything changed. Suddenly, Eva was eating steel-cut oatmeal with cooked peaches for breakfast and we snuck in a few meals featuring ingredients some may have called “advanced” for Eva’s then 9 months of age. But by the time our friends left, I’d nailed down winning combinations like pureed steak, roasted beets and parsley or lentil soup pureed with Greek yogurt. I joked with my husband that Eva’s pureed diet involved ingredients that were healthier than the foods we were eating as her parents.

So when I was asked by an editor if I was interested in developing baby food recipes, I jumped at the chance. They wanted to pay me to come up with unusual baby food recipes that I could test out on my 10-month-old daughter? Done. Where do I sign?

I was in pureed baby food nirvana, coming up with combinations that included foods like wild salmon, dill, sour cream and baby peas. But I felt myself stalling again, content to let my daughter gain all her nutrients and satisfy her palate through a daily diet of pureed food. Good pureed foods, but nevertheless, pureed.

We were at a friend’s birthday at a bowling alley when I noticed my friend’s 16-month-old son carrying around a dry bagel that he tore through using his teeth and hands. Up until this point, Eva has been more a of finger food eater, using very few utensils as she was more of a pincher-grasp connoisseur. I asked my friend when her son had started biting into foods and she said she’d started by giving him whole bananas. Duh. It was too obvious. For dinner, my daughter ate a pureed cauliflower, rosemary and white bean concoction. And for dessert? A whole banana I picked up on the way home from the bowling alley.

It was fascinating to watch. As soon as I set the banana into her shatter-proof melamine bowl, her little hands reached out and seized the thing and tore it in two. She then jammed one-half into her mouth and I watched and smiled as she chomped into the banana. She grinned back at me and continued eating away, occasionally taking bites so big that her immediate response was to push out the offending chunk with her tongue and spit it out. (Chalk one for Mother Nature giving babies the ability to react accordingly.)

So for dinner tonight, I decided to make Eva a little pasta meal of chopped up whole-wheat fusilli tossed with a bit of olive oil, freshly grated parmigiano-reggiano cheese and black pepper. It’s one of my favorite meals (Cacio e pepe, as the Italians call it, and they sure know their food.), and I figured it was soft enough to mash with her gums and small enough to swallow in case the mashing didn’t go so well. It was also the perfect size and texture for her fingers to pluck.

As soon as I set it down at the table, along with a few cubes of roasted butternut squash, Eva reached for the pasta and swatted it around with her fingers for a few minutes before gingerly putting a piece in her mouth. She kept her eyes on her plate and smacked her lips together a few times, as if mulling over whether it needed more parm or pepper. Apparently, the dish passed her muster and her fingers went in for more. She had finished a few bites before she looked at me and smiled, baring a few teeth and a whole lot of gums. “Mmmmm,” Eva said.

I sighed, happy.

Last week, I came home after a rare late night out with friends to a quiet apartment. Husband, baby and dog were all asleep. The living room lights were off save for the eerie green glow that emanated from Eva’s baby monitor. Maybe my exhaustion had caught up with me or the glasses of wine I’d consumed had me feeling punchy, but the sight of it left behind in the living room instantly angered me.

Eva doesn’t cry out to be freed from her crib once awake. Part of me suspects this is from the fact that once she’s up, we’ve always seen it on the monitor and gone it to get her. An interesting phenomenon to ponder, yes, but it doesn’t bother me much as I figure I’ll be using the monitor for quite some time, so I needn’t worry about her quietly spending hours trapped in the crib.

So on my night out, I was looking forward to coming home a teeny bit tipsy, brushing my teeth and collapsing into bed. Instead, I collected the monitor and set it up quietly in our bedroom so as to not wake-up my unbothered husband, and fumed silently about the fact that even when I wanted to pretend to be irresponsible again, I was still responsible.

How do men do it? How do they end up unsaddled and nonplussed by the responsibilities of parenthood? What about the Mr. Moms of the world? What about gay couples? I don’t mean to generalize, but I don’t think I’m being wholly inaccurate.

We didn’t finish setting up the nursery until Eva was about two months old. (Yes, you read that right.) Luckily, I had a baby nurse at that time. Casey was working around the clock on a project, and with a high-maintenance beagle that needed to be walked and nonstop snowstorms on the forecast, I needed the extra pair of hands. Those extra pair of hands helped me arrange furniture in the nursery, remove tags from baby clothes and basically provide support for me as I loved and cared for my newborn while regretting the fact that we’d waited so long.

So why did we wait? Let’s just say it involved a marital squabble late in my third term of pregnancy centered around my husband’s point that Eva wouldn’t be sleeping in the nursery initially anyway, so why rush? His poker buddies—the majority of which were already dads—all confirmed for him that our daughter would sleep in her bassinet right next to our bed, so why bother with the act of setting up the nursery considering I was then hormonal, cranky and unable to bend over. My type-A personality was not pleased one bit, but as anyone that’s married knows, you have to pick your battles. But, of course, once Eva was born, I realized my maternal urge to nest and set things up stemmed from the fact that I now no longer had the time to nest or set things up. Lesson learned: Take care of it yourself if you want things done. It’s not like I’d never learned that before.

On Sunday morning, just after putting Eva down for a nap, I found myself feeling a bit stressed as I went through my mental checklist: place diaper order, send in Eva’s laundry, buy groceries for dinner, clean up Eva’s toys, make Eva’s lunch…oh, and finish writing two stories for tomorrow’s deadline. And while I allowed my flustered mind to get the best of me, my husband sat on the couch reading his Sunday paper, a ritual he had loved since long before I ever entered the picture. I started to nag him a little (ugh—how I hate that quality…), essentially projecting my frustrations a bit, and asked him to call the Laundromat to come pick up Eva’s laundry and clean up Eva’s toys.

I watched him nod silently with his eyes still glued to the sports page and sat there for a few minutes in disbelief at his ability to sit there and ignore me and totally lost it. I named all the items on my list of things to do, some squabbling ensued and it wasn’t until Casey uttered the line, “Do you want me to itemize all the things I do?” that I realized I’d chosen a pointless battle.

Even if he did help with the list, I knew he’d forget something or not do it the way I’d want it done. (The better way, if I’m being honest and snooty with myself.) If he picked up the groceries, he’d come home with unripe produce that would be useless for tonight’s dinner. If he called the Laundromat, I’d have to remind him to label Eva’s bag separately to ensure that they washed it using the baby detergent I’d left with them behind the counter. These were things that if I wanted done correctly, it was easier to do them myself. And faster, too, so that I didn’t have to deal with explaining how I wanted them done. Call me a control freak, fine. It’s not the first time I’ve heard that—or thought that—unfortunately. But I am (mostly) fine with it.

Later that afternoon, I was at the playground with a friend who juggles motherhood and a high-octane career and listened to her complain about how her husband manages to run a thriving Manhattan club yet has no idea how to place an online diaper order. With their working hours being at odds with each other, her husband has their son solo for part of the day during the week before their nanny arrives, and every morning my friend finds herself preparing a snack and lunch for her son while feeding him breakfast in order to avoid having her husband feed their child cheese slices and processed food for all his meals. It’s her way of battling mommy guilt and being in control, she says. I hear this story and all I can think is, “Why can’t our husbands, the dads, learn?”

I love spending the days with Eva going for walks, playing on the swings and just watching her take-in all the world has to offer, but at the end of each day, I’m pooped. And when my husband walks in through the door, sometimes all I want to do is sit on the couch and watch them play, too physically drained to do much else and too mentally drained to tackle another work deadline.

Today I watched my husband breeze through the door after work, let our dog George off his leash and shout to Eva in a boisterous, booming voice, “Come to me, my daughter!” Eva squealed with laughter and thundered across our hardwood floor on all fours, crawling as fast as she could right up to her dad. He swooped her into the air, tickling her, and she continued to laugh hysterically as he did the same. I collapsed onto the couch and we chatted intermittently about our days as I watched him build her a towering castle made up of her alphabet blocks and other odds and ends. As he searched for other bits to use to build turrets and other wings of the castle, I watched my daughter crawl after him, gazing up at him adoringly and happily, all the while knocking down different towers and waiting for him to build them right back up.

I’m envious of my husband’s carefree relationship with our daughter. Their time together is unfettered by responsibility. I can’t explain why Casey and I have fallen into our roles, and I can’t explain why sometimes it bothers me and other times it doesn’t. It’s just how things are in our household. But the one thing I do understand is that being a good parent doesn’t mean being the best at placing prompt and efficient diaper orders. Somebody has to deal with all that business, yes, and in our family, that someone is me. But for all those times when I’m tired from being responsible and unable to be the fun, playful parent I aspire to be, I’m glad to have my husband walk through the door, unfettered from the reality of responsibility and excited to play with his little girl. It’s how we balance our family, I guess. And it’s fun to watch from the couch.

When I hear the words “young mom,” I immediately picture a woman in jeans and a t-shirt, bent over running after a mobile being on all fours clad in footie pajamas, weighing under 20 pounds and wearing a diaper. I am pretty sure that all moms picture an approximation of the same thing.

This was the week of Chasing Down My Daughter. If Eva wasn’t crawling towards our dog’s water bowl to splash her hand in it mischievously, she was heading towards the electrical outlet to poke and prod at the plastic baby-proofing cover. She’s been crawling for about a month now, and with each week, her speed has picked up exponentially. (Or it feels like it anyway.) She is on a path of exploration around our apartment, with each lap around the living room revealing a new random hazard such as a wayward coin or tiny pebble that’s been transported into our apartment by a pair of shoes—all objects that peak my daughter’s curiosity.