Feeding Baby 'Baby Food'

I decided early on to ‘make my own baby food’ which is just a fancy way of saying I’m giving my baby some of the food we eat.  Long before I had any appreciation for raising children, a friend of mine attempted making baby food and I thought it was a waste of precious time.  A way to compensate for something she felt was lacking in her parenting.  Why not just buy the jars?  It’s meant for babies.

The benefits of knowing what goes into the food is not the selling point for me.  It’s knowing that the foods we eat on a regular basis will be known to this new roommate of ours and we won’t be glared at over the dinner table because our meals don’t measure up to a Gerber combination or Osh Kosh B’Gosh entrée.

With a breastfed baby, the recommendation is to wait until six months of age to start solid foods.  That gave me plenty of time to prepare.  WRONG.

I started out looking up what foods a baby can eat at first.  Instead I found lists upon lists of things they should not eat.  How it should be prepared.  How it should be stored.  And why it can only be organic or you may as well take your baby to a cancer store and pick out what type you want him or her to get.

I moved on to preparation.  I can pick the menu later.

Machines that are specially designed for baby food preparation are literally hundreds of dollars.  They put the words ‘first foods’ or ‘infant approved’ in the name and all of a sudden a hand blender or food processor is a thing of magic.  I couldn’t tell the difference in the household appliances and the exclusively marketed machines so I put THAT decision off too.

Storage.  Seems to me an ice cube tray does the exact same thing that a silicone tray would do or single serving one ounce jars with lids.  But then I couldn’t be sure if my ice cube trays contained BPA which is practically the equivalent of putting bleach in the food.  I’m not sure what BPA does except that it’s not in some of the toys we have for our baby so it must be bad.

I saw some silicone cupcake trays at a craft store and I get coupons for half off one item every few weeks but something about a cupcake tray didn’t feel right.  It didn’t say baby on it anywhere.

As the months clicked by, I’d keep venturing onto the internet to try researching one more time.  I’d meekly ask another mom how she planned to feed her baby.  The responses may as well have been in a foreign language.  They had read all the same things I did and instead of filtering out useless information, they just repeated it.  No BPA.  No frozen breast milk.  Just ask so-and-so, she makes her own baby food and knows all about that stuff.  But when I asked so-and-so, she put me onto a list of the twelve things you should NEVER feed your child.  Lo and behold, it was eight or nine of the things I eat on a regular basis.  Where’s that cancer store again?

By the time my baby turned six months old, he was feeding constantly.  He had four teeth.  I had to make a move.

Next blog post:  the horrible FRUITS and VEGETABLES I feed my child.