The baby's mouth and what we've found there:

Baby E (Tenacious E and Honey Badger to those who know her well) is the adventurous sort and thus eating has been quite the ride for all of us in the NLMTYS household.  

There's a movement afoot called Baby Led Weaning which focuses on children being in charge of what they eat from an early age -- before weaning, solids are really more social than nutritive and thus the Baby Led Weaning idea focuses on self-feeding for the children.  Rather than shovel pureed peas and potted meats into the now-adventurous eating baby, you spread some food on their tray and go from there. 

Here in the NLMTYS household, we didn't really focus on BLW so much as ended up there out of necessity.  We have 2 other children, a geriatric cat, a frog, and some fish to take care of - so often sweet Baby E was a bit on her own in the feeding territory.  We started small and she'd rake handfuls of rice krispies into her mouth.  Little actually stuck and she got a few servings of rice cereal, pureed sweet potato, and some winter squash - but she, and we, soon grew tired of the process.  Baby E has MonkeyMoo and The Budge to keep up with and she wanted to eat like they ate.  So, for the most part, we let her - with some chopped up beans here and some banana spears there. 

Overall this has worked out very well for us.  Dinner time is as social as it can be with 3 overly tired and twitchy children.  Baby E barks out her rudimentary language at intermittent intervals, trying to fit in and keep up with the big kids. 

But you have to remember: babies are kind of stupid. 

Well, not stupid so much as inexperienced.  Inexperienced enough not to really know or understand the subtle difference between food and non-food items.  I think that introducing her to a world where SHE is in charge of shoveling things in her mouth (rather than her father, siblings, or me), may have upset the delicate balance that keeps her from eating, you know, trash. 

Or maybe she has pica.  Who am I to say? 

But I just wanted to run you through a brief laundry list of what we've found in Baby E's mouth since she began crawling five weeks ago: 

A button. Cat food, which she picked from cat vomit. An almond. Grass. The graphite powder that lined the track for the back door. Leaves.  Tiny bits of wood. Bigger bits of wood.  Cat hair. Garlic skins. Dog hair. Cat poop. Sand. Pebbles. A fairly large hunk of onion. A small bit of spicy jalapeno. A balloon.  A chunk of stomp rocket.  Herbs. A bit of silver ribbon.  A walnut.  Cords.  The tubes to the fish tank bubbler.  The fish tank bubbler.  A bug. As much of the sofa as was humanly possible.  Flip flops.  Crocs.  Aglets of any shape or size.*

*Incomplete list.  (And there will be no diaper-related addendum.  Nobody needs that.)