Cricket Food
I'm not saying it's going to start soon. In fact I'd rather it didn't start for awhile, but I believe the time is near.
Cricket may want to eat food soon. He got a very very cool spoon from his Grandma P and transferred it from hand to hand quite adeptly, if I do say so myself, and then put it into his mouth. Repeatedly.
I am not going to feed him anything other that the breast for a bit to come. I think he should be a confident sitter before feeding him. (I can come up with a thousand reasons to not give him anything other than the breast, and really, I'm not planning on feeding him "food" next week or anything...)
But it is going to happen, and when it does, I want to be prepared. I plan on making the food myself. And as a cookbook aficionado, I want to know good baby food making sources.
Now comment! Please!
Cricket may want to eat food soon. He got a very very cool spoon from his Grandma P and transferred it from hand to hand quite adeptly, if I do say so myself, and then put it into his mouth. Repeatedly.
I am not going to feed him anything other that the breast for a bit to come. I think he should be a confident sitter before feeding him. (I can come up with a thousand reasons to not give him anything other than the breast, and really, I'm not planning on feeding him "food" next week or anything...)
But it is going to happen, and when it does, I want to be prepared. I plan on making the food myself. And as a cookbook aficionado, I want to know good baby food making sources.
Now comment! Please!
Labels: à la carte
posted by Katie at 4:27 PM
9 Comments:
Anything you eat, IMO. Have you looked up 'baby-led weaning' or 'baby-led solids'? That's a good place to start if you want to be like me, and you know you do.
I agree with Emilin, just about anything you eat that is soft will work. Just steam veggies until they're soft and puree in food processor (or blender, or whatever else you have), adding a little breast milk (or liquid from steaming) to thin to the desired consistency. We've done sweet potatoes this way. Stuff like bananas or avocados we just mash up really well and then thin with BM.
Check out www.wholesomebabyfood.com for some good info. Also, the book Super Baby Food is good.
Sweet potatoes is usually a sure fire favorite, and you can make them in the crock pot with veeeeery little work from you. And Jen at Addition Problems also points out that you can bake them in the oven to a nice consistency, too, with very little work from you.
Baby-led feeding (or "weaning" in the UK sense - meaning introduction of solids rather than cessation of breastfeeding) is The. Way. To. Go. The basics: when your child is ready for food (self-sitting, showing interest in food, beginnings of a pincer grasp, no tongue thrust), offer him/her stick-shaped pieces of food to explore. Most babies will do just that, explore, for quite some time and it may be months before they are eating substantial amounts of food.
The key is that they will eat when they are developmentally ready, not when some book or doctor says they are.
And the side benefit? It's so, so easy on the parents! Healthy, too, as people generally start with steamed vegetables and add in other whole foods as the child gets more interested in food. No processing, no preservatives or additives, just good whole foods.
People attribute all kinds of benefits to BLW - less pickiness about texture (because they've experienced a variety of textures from the beginning), less risk of allergies (because babies theoretically "know" to avoid foods they can't tolerate - not sure about this one), less picky about food in general, easier to feed kid while out and about as they can eat almost anything, more independent (definitely true). Oh, and how can I forget - CHEAPER! No expensive jars! It's also very compatible with extended breastfeeding.
Some people make it like a religion but we were pretty laid back about it. Natalie occasionally had pureed fruit because before we learned of BLW we had pureed a bunch of summer fruit and frozen it, but even with spooned foods, she's in control - we load the spoon and hand it to her.
We love it.
Ditto wholesomebabyfood.com There's pretty much everything you'd need to know there. I made all my boy's food and it was easy. I'd make big batches and freeze it in ice cube trays.
Oh, and even if you do go for pureed foods, skip baby cereal. It's gross and nutritionally pretty limited. If you want to do cereal, make oatmeal (run the dry oats in a food proc, blender, or mini chop for a minute or two to make them almost like flour before cooking) and thin it with breastmilk.
Do not believe the hype about breastmilk and iron (or lack thereof). Kellymom has good info on iron and breastmilk if you need to refute arguments about how you HAVE TO feed cereal. We didn't bother refuting, we just ignored the advice!
We used super baby food too and liked it although the book we have is getting outdated. Maybe there is a new edition now? Carrie liked mashed avocado or mashed banana at first.
Because we suffer the infernal pickiness (due to aversions & other wunnerful preemie issues from intobation), we skipped the jarred foods and cereal after a few tries - she hated it, I wore most of it and it became to expensive (my clothes did not come clean, neither did hers and she didn't get a damn thing out of it...) we do the "eat what we eat" technique and except for a few things that have resulted in mopping the floor twice in less than 24 hrs, we're surviving.
Blender, food processor, fork mashing - whatever works to get it to small mush.
I have written you some fantastic run on sentences.. hope this helps! :-)
hugs to you all
I got lots of ideas from Annabel Karmel's cookbooks.
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