Baby Food Part 4 . . . and some news!

I'm back! Sorry for the delay between posts. I have some very exciting news, which semi-justifies my delay--we're selling our house! My hubby and I know it's the right time, so we've been working faithfully to de-clutter and spruce up our home. I always vowed I wouldn't save updates to do on my house until I get ready to sell--why not update while I'm living there and enjoy some of the fruit of my labors, right? Well, that has panned out to making the transition to sell a fairly straightforward process. If my hubby weren't working over sixty hours a week, we could've been ready to go in a matter of a couple of weeks, but with a hubby who's not home much (and when he is, he's justifiably exhausted), two little ones under my constant care, and a semi-normal existence, it's been a challenge to get anything, no matter how small, done in a reasonable amount of time.

photo courtesy of kevindooley

Of course, this naturally begs the question, where are you moving to? The answer is simply, I don't know. We're looking for some change--either closer to everything we love in the city, or possibly land on the outskirts. With as little free time as we have, we've decided to take things ONE STEP AT A TIME. First step, prep the house to sell. Second step, find a realtor and put the house on the market. Finally, start doing some research about where we want to live.

Okay, I'll keep you posted. In the meantime, here are some more baby food suggestions and hints I've picked up in the midst of transitioning my baby from nursing to solids.

1. Taste the food you're giving your child. If you don't like it, don't give it to him/her. This is especially true with jarred baby food. Thankfully there's a great new alternative that we've been taking full advantage of--baby food in a squeeze pouch. It's re-sealable so you can use the leftovers later. There's no spoon needed--just squeeze the food into your baby's mouth. And when he/she gets older, he/she can feed himself/herself. My baby's a little over nine months, and she's already got the pouches mastered on her own.

You've got to do some shopping to get the good prices. Our favorite brand right now is Happy Tot because it's organic, tastes really good, and the packaging is BPA free. (Although the new studies on how people are able to so quickly making plastic products BPA free is a bit disturbing. For more information, read this.) We can find Happy Tot in some of our Targets, but not all of them. And it's way cheaper than Plum Organics. Happy Tot also went on sale at Babies R Us recently, so that's a good place to watch. But, the best prices are on Amazon--sign up to be an Amazon Mom, and then use the "Subscribe and Save" option instead of checking out through your cart--there are also occasional discount codes available too).

2. It's easy to feed your baby sweet fruits and sweet orange veggies, but give green a try! Spinach has been really easy for me to incorporate. I can blend raw baby spinach in fruit smoothies, and none of my family--even the big kids (hubby included) are any wiser. I can rub baby spinach with sea salt, drizzle with olive oil, and chop with some kalamata olives, and my nine-month old will eat it without hesitation. As I've mentioned before, I try to incorporate raw foods into my baby's diet as much as possible, and I've found that blending pears and spinach, or apples and spinach is really easy, really healthy, and my baby loves it!

Oh, and I use my Magic Bullet to make all my baby food--it really is magical. Another tip, if it's not blending right away and you need to add some liquid, use coconut water. It has so many more nutrients and good stuff in it than just plain tap water. My firstborn used to drink bottles of coconut water with her meals. She loved it. My second born isn't as excited, but she doesn't mind it blended in her food.

3. As I mentioned before, I'm following Gabriel Cousens's guide to raw baby food. To give you an idea of how we started things, I've give you a really abbreviated list of foods we used. To get the whole list, you'll have to buy the book.

At six months we used a lot of bananas, coconut water, mangos, pears, cucumbers (peeled & blended) and avocados.

LOTS of avocados!

At eight months we added some almonds (soaked and blended with fruit they make DELICIOUS porridges), grapes, olives, and more. Nine months is when we added more greens--kale, spinach, and more. And like I said, you really just need to buy the book to get the full lists and the delicious recipes. Seriously, I eat any leftovers of the recipes I make from this book. They are so yummy!

4. We talked about the dirty dozen before. I want to give you one more tip about using produce that will really set you up for success--and it will help you actually use all of the produce you buy. I think I heard this first on the Rachel Ray show. Wash/soak your produce as soon as you get home and unload the groceries. My routine is to unload groceries. As I'm unloading, I stack all the produce that needs to be soaked by the sink. Once my counters are clear again, I fill my sinks with an apple cider vinegar/purified water mix, and I throw everything in the sinks and let them soak for 30-60 minutes. Bam! It's all washed, so I don't cringe when pulling it out and grumbling as I wash it while rushing to make a meal. Bam! It's ready to eat, so I can just pop it in my mouth when I need a snack.

This is a pretty average supply of produce for one week (about two sinks' full).

What are your baby food tips? I'd love to hear what you've used, what you've found effective, and what you'd recommend to others just starting.

**Coming soon--pictures and details about my daughter's three-year birdie birthday party!

Baby Food Part 2--Formula Alternative

photo courtesy of healthaliciousness

When I started my baby food journey with my first, we had a less-than-happy time trying to find the right balance. I also tried making almond mylk which is a legitimate substitute for infant formula--please note that I'm not talking about the almond milk you buy in the store--that stuff is full of sodium. Here's a recipe for what I tried making:

Almond Mylk:

1 C raw almonds soaked 4-6 hours in purified water, drain before mixing
3 C coconut water (you can get from young thai coconuts available at Whole Foods, easy to open and fairly cheap . . . or you can get it in the drink section at WF in boxes).

Process all ingredients in blender until smooth. Can warm for babies to same temp as mother's milk. Don't overheat. Let it cool. (I had to pour this through cheese cloth to get the almond grit out).

When I made this recipe, I didn't have a lot of hope for making it work, and I was really overwhelmed with the price of the ingredients I was buying. Three years later, I now know my way around the health food store a lot more, and I know the cheapest organic/raw food prices from box stories to specialty stores. My point is that your success with this recipe is all about attitude. I had a skeptical attitude when I made it, so I was looking for reasons for it not to work. When you're looking for an excuse to fail, you'll always find it.

With my second baby, my supply started to wane around four months again, but this time I did things differently:

1. I demand fed during the day. The more I nursed, the more supply I had for the next feeding.

2. I drank lots of water and went to a fruit/veggie-heavy diet.

3. I took the supplements--all of them. I didn't skimp on them this time. I even drank the nasty tea.

I would've used the almond mylk, but I didn't end up needing it. We made it to six months on breast milk only!

My baby's first-food details coming up in part three.

Baby Food Part 1

In my transition to make healthy lifestyle, especially food-wise, a priority in my life again, I've been putting a lot of focus (and time) on my newborn's baby food. I want to give her the best start possible as she's growing and developing a healthy digestive, immune, endocrine, and all those other amazing systems affected by the food we eat.

A little history . . .

My now-toddler started crying when I finished nursing her around four months. I knew she was still hungry, but my supply just wasn't keeping up. I refused to switch to formula, so I tried a couple of things.

1. I started taking supplements that boosted my supply. They worked, but because they were so expensive, I didn't keep up with them as I should have, and my supply went back down again.

2. I tried pumping at random hours of the night. Since my hubby gets up at an ungodly hour to go to work, if I wasn't already up feeding, I got up with him and pumped.

Both helped a little but not enough. So, I decided that it was time to introduce solids. I went out and bought organic rice cereal, mixed it with what little milk I had pumped, and we were on to solids. Soon I was adding bananas, avocados, sweet potatoes, and whatever age-appropriate stage-one organic baby food I could find. I wasn't patient enough to introduce one food at a time, and before too long, her face started breaking out into circular red patches. And later they started to ooze. We switched cereal brands, switched laundry detergents, I made my own food when possible, we eliminated foods, etc., but nothing seemed to work. I finally opted for a teensy bit of steroid cream that final cleared things up. Since then we use sporadic amounts of the cream whenever her now-diagnosed eczema shows up (and it's not just on her face--it pops up everywhere).

Two important things I've learned since then:

1. Studies are now showing that babies' digestive enzymes are actually not capable of properly processing rice and oatmeal for at least the first year of their lives. Since they can't break it down properly, the body does strange things with it to try and get rid of it (e.g., eczema).

2. A good friend of ours has diabetes. He's had it since he was a kid . . . and it showed up soon after he had a steroid shot to treat a bad case of poison ivy. The doctors didn't ever tell him there was a link, but he overheard them discussing it in the hallway.

Needless to say, I've approached feeding my second newborn solids a lot differently. I'll give more details in my next blog. Stay tuned.

**photo courtesy of stevendepolo