Iris has been eating yogurt almost as long as she’s been eating solids. We started out buying Brown Cow plain yogurt and mixing it with Gerber fruit purees, which are really good, especially the pear. In fact, a 50-50 mix of whole milk plain yogurt and strained pears with a shake of cinnamon would be a good breakfast for anyone.

“Yogurt” was also one of Iris’s first words, but it came out sounding something like “yoingyoing.” Sometimes she would say, “Dada. Yoingyoing. Dada. Yoingyoing,” nonstop until I began spooning yogurt into her mouth. Now she says it more like “nongurt.”

I’ve gotten too lazy to mix up fruit yogurt first thing in the morning. Sometimes we buy Brown Cow flavored yogurts, but these have many drawbacks. They’re expensive and too sweet, and they’re fruit-at-the-bottom, which I’ve always found kind of gross and hard to mix. Finally, Iris and I prefer a less runny yogurt. Sometimes we get Tillamook, especially Key Lime Pie flavor (which is more spoonable because it’s made with gelatin), but it’s hard to pretend that this is nutritious.

Then Laurie introduced us to Greek yogurt.

Greek yogurt has no gelatin, but your spoon will stand up in it because it’s strained. This also means that it has more fat than whole-milk yogurt. People under two need a high-fat diet for healthy brain development. People over thirty have less of an excuse, but Greek yogurt is awesome. At Trader Joe’s they sell Total brand, which is the smoothest and has a little pot of honey integrated in the cup. They also sell their own brand, which comes in a bunch of blended flavors, including strawberry, strawberry-banana, honey, and fig.

The fig yogurt is awesome. It’s probably what that “figgy pudding” song is talking about. It’s full of chunks of dried fig and crunchy fig seeds, which Iris calls “bumps.”

Iris is of the age where she can pick up phrases out in the world (most often at Grandma’s house). The other day I sat her down at the breakfast table and gave us each a bowl of fig yogurt. I took a bite and said, “Mmm…fig yogurt.”

Iris said, in a tone of mock astonishment, “Wait a minute! That’s not fig yogurt!”

She was wrong, so I don’t know if this makes her really smart or just the opposite.