I have been feeding Eva a few bites of this and that every few days for about a month now. I finally decided to gather some appropriate first foods type baby edibles to be ready as she starts wanting more food. I’ve made homemade baby food before, so this is an easy one for me. A quick trip to the store turned up a jar of baby carrots, and grown-up cans of unsweetened canned peaches and unsalted peas and unsalted green beans (all much cheaper than baby food). I also grabbed a six pack of organic applesauce cups. These are marketed to kids, but the only difference between the baby and kids stuff is the price and the size of the package.
While Eva won’t be eating a whole 4 ounce container of apple sauce, I figured it was still cheaper than jars of baby food. I’ll keep one in the diaper bag so I always have something to give her. I’ll finish off anything she won’t eat.
All told I got probably 2 months of baby food for about $6 or so. I’ll run the grown up stuff through the mini food processor, then freeze it in portion sizes. The experts say not to make your own baby carrots, beets, or spinach since they can have too many nitrates in them and the baby food people already test for that. So, that is why I got the more expensive pureed carrots rather than making my own from real carrots.
Eva has been cranky the last few days because she has another cold (two in four months is probably average, but still tiresome). She can’t sleep because her nose is stuffy and her throat is sore. So, for 3 nights she has been up every hour or so all night. Last night was better, but she is tired. So, for the extra vitamin A I decided to try her on carrots before her nap today. I mixed up a little batch of rice cereal with carrots. Didn’t taste too bad to me. Eva had a different opinion.
Guess who is not overly fond of carrots? Guess who can blow food out of her mouth now? Guess who covered mommy in carrot pox?
They say you need to try a kid on a new food 7-11 times before they will decide they like it. Good thing, cause I have a whole jar of carrots to use up now!
I managed to shovel enough of it in enough times that I think some actually we down. My little chipmunk was holding it in her mouth to avoid swallowing, so what came out was bigger than what went in. Finally, I started to sing to her in the hope of distracting her – or torturing her into compliance, depending on your view of my singing ability.
To the tune of the Yellow Brick Road song from the Wizard of Oz:
Swallow, swallow, swallow! Swallow the orange carrot stuff!
Swallow, swallow, swallow! Swallow the orange carrot stuff!
She laughed. Then blew more carrot pox on me.
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1 comment
daddy
January 27, 2009 at 9:52 pm (UTC -6) Link to this comment
I think that it is wonderful that she is learning how to eat solid foods. She usually tries it while I’m at work so that I don’t have to help clean up the messes.
