Tag: baby food

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Stuff I’m Digging: Baby Gourmet Baby Food

Head’s up! It’s a giveaway!

Hey, you. Yes, you, the one up to her elbows in organic sweet potato puree with the salt-free, homemade chicken stock simmering away on the stove. Good for you. There are a whole bunch of reasons making your own baby food is great. It’s cheaper and fresher and you know exactly what’s in it, for starters. You also get to control portion sizes and play around with adding flavours and ingredients.

Strange, then, that I wasn’t able to remember any of those reasons when I was scrambling to get three kids fed and dressed and out the door in time to catch the school bus. When Mary was starting on solids last year, it was all I could do to run the dishwasher every day and find any food to put on the table, let alone prepare special batches of purees for my freezer.

Instead, I relied on a mix of organic, store-bought baby food (which is totally fine and healthy, cut yourself some slack) and putting steamed veggies from our meals through the baby food mill or mashing them with a fork on the fly. Most babies are really only on the pureed stuff for a couple months anyway and will be putting away soft finger foods before you know it.

And then, when Mary was 7 or 8 months old, I discovered Baby Gourmet and the clouds parted and angels started singing. Not exactly, but it was pretty great. First of all, the packaging is genius. The food is all organic and comes in little squeezable pouches so you can squeeze it right onto the spoon without contaminating the rest of the package with saliva. Screw the cap back on and save the rest for later. It’s the ideal baby food for when you’re out and about.

They’ve also just added six new flavours to their line up: 1. Banana, Apple, Fig, Oatmeal and Greek Yogurt, 2. Banana, Apple and Beetberry, 3. Banana, Apple and Kale Blend, 4. Minty Pears, Apples and Peas, 5. Cherry Apple Blossom and 6. Fruity Carrot and Greek Yogurt Smoothie. I don’t have an infant anymore so the three kids and I cracked these open to sample ourselves. They were all delicious. They were so good, in fact, that my four-year old keeps sneaking the left overs out of the fridge to eat as a snack. I even promised her some for dessert one day!

Win some and see for yourself. I’m giving away a prize pack of all six new flavours. Contest closes Friday, March 29 at 11:59pm. Canada and US.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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Cereal Binging

I’ve been sprinkling Cheerios on Mary’s high chair tray to buy myself a few extra minutes in the kitchen for the past couple weeks. She loves them and has almost mastered her pincer grasp by plucking a Cheerio between her thumb and forefinger. Well, she picks up Cheerios and also any little snippet of paper or random speck of garbage on the floor; she’s not that discriminating.

But yesterday there was most of a whole bowl full of dry Brown Rice Krispies sitting in the kitchen when I plopped Mary in her high chair. Colum has long-standing issues with sogginess and breakfast cereal and now Irene won’t have milk on her cereal either. The only problem, of course, is that nobody actually wants to dig into a bowl full of dry cereal. Gah. Why, oh why, can’t my kids just eat a bloody bowl of cereal for breakfast and be done with it? Why does it have to be so hard?!

So there’s this bowl full of Rice Krispies and I think, “Hmm.” I check out the nutritional info and the ingredient list and it doesn’t seem any worse than Cheerios. I sprinkle a few grains onto the high chair and Mary happily starts eating it. “Mary likes Rice Krispies!” I exclaim to no one in particular. I then turn around for, I don’t know, TEN SECONDS, to take the kids’ lunch off the stove and Irene dumps huge fistfuls of Rice Krispies on Mary’s high chair tray.

So there’s, like, a mountain of dry Rice Krispies on the high chair and Mary just face plants into it. Rice Krispies are flying everywhere and Mary comes up for air, grinning like no tomorrow, gumming huge mouthfuls of the stuff. She keeps going back down for more, delirious over the sheer quantity of food.

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This was probably her fifth nose dive into it and really doesn’t do justice to the amount of cereal she started with.

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What’s so funny, guys? No, really. What is it?

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Third-time Firsts

Ah, firsts.

I remember diligently listening to my doctor’s recommendation to begin introducing Colum to solids with runny rice cereal mixed with breast milk and then to sloooowly introduce one food at a time, looking out for signs of allergies. I bought organic, brown rice cereal and painstakingly expressed fresh milk for each feed.

Irene had a similar start only I had wised up and just kept a bottle of breast milk in the fridge to use for cereal at first. I soon realized that pureed fruit make an excellent baby cereal vehicle too.

Both times I thought long and hard about what and when I would introduce my baby to solids. I looked forward to it. It was a big deal.  This time I thought maybe I’d skip the baby cereals altogether since they’re really only so much filler and the iron absorption rate for babies is low. I would probably buy some organic produce and start with that and then move on to meat for iron. And I’d definitely wait until she was fully six months. I thought.

Fast forward to last Saturday. My hand is cramping up from squeezing the manual breast pump for so long and I still only have six ounces of expressed breast milk. That’s actually not a bad, uh, harvest? I just haven’t started pumping early enough to get as much as I wanted. I’m attending a couple sessions of Podcamp Toronto and then meeting some friends for dinner and may be gone as long as six or seven hours. I think about dashing out to Shoppers for some “just in case” formula, but  don’t want to spend a lot of money on formula we’ll hardly use and I’m already running late.

“Here’s six ounces of breast milk,” I tell Ed, “Give her two three-ounce feeds and there’s a jar of baby apple sauce and some rice cereal in the cupboard. Feed her a little of that in between to fill her up. It’ll be fine.” And then I leave.

Yep, two ingredients instead of one; non-organic, ultra-processed rice cereal given to me as swag from somewhere; and a jar of organic baby food Santa had put in her stocking for the benefit of her older sibs. Oh, and she’s still two weeks shy of six months. And you know what? It’s fine.

Ed was kind enough to record this milestone for me. Let’s watch together:

She’s saying she wants more, Ed! Why aren’t you listening!? Thanks for having your sister’s back, Colum and Irene.

I’ve continued giving her a little pureed apple at dinner time (which is when she really wants to join in and eat with the rest of us) sans rice cereal. Last night I put some steamed broccoli from our dinner through the baby food mill and she gobbled it up. Interestingly, she had an easier time swallowing the more textured broccoli than the super-smooth jarred apple sauce that sometimes was thrust back out. I think it’s because it’s less like a liquid and therefore less confusing. I really don’t get why babies over five-months old need super thin purees.

The only thing I’m really sad about? Breast milk poop! Oh how I’ll miss that mild-smelling, water-soluble poo. Here comes months of mushy, stinky, real food poo and new adventures in cloth diapering. I’m really going to need a lid for the diaper pail now.