Making Baby Food - The Right Way

If you don't know already making your own baby food is MUCH cheaper than buying the canned/pouch stuff. For instance a can of baby applesauce is around $1.00. Instead you can buy an apple for less than a dollar and make around 3 cans with it. Much cheaper.

Anyway after making many bunches of baby food I've decided to let you know how I do it.

First of all Baby Bullet.... Great cute gift, great idea. Not very practical....

The Baby Bullet system comes with a blender, short cup, little jars, and one freezer tray. The blender is great is you're only going to make one of everything. Like put one apple, one banana, one sweet potato, etc.... But that can take FOREVER!!! If you only make one of each thing you'll just have to make it all over again in a week.

Baby food can last for a month in the freezer, so why not make as much as you need for a month and freeze it all? Problem is the Baby Bullet really can't handle that much. It takes FOREVER to blend anything besides a banana. You're constantly opening the container shoving the spatula in there trying to figure out why the thing isn't moving anymore. Pain in the butt... Also after you've spend ten years trying to blend a sweet potato you can't even put this blender in the dishwasher!

My solution? Just use a regular old food processor. You can put like 3 sweet potatoes in one and done in seconds! Also you can put all the pieces of a food processor in your handy dandy dishwasher.

Okay second part that isn't really necessary that the Baby Bullet has. The little jars to put the food in. Great I guess if you're constantly eating somewhere besides home and you need to put your food in jars. Problem with the jars is they are also way too much food than your child will actually eat in the beginning. Also major problem is you can't refreeze or refrigerate food after you have stuck a spoon in the jar that was in your child's mouth. Bacteria.....

So because of this issue the best solution is the freezer trays. The Baby Bullet comes with one tiny freezer tray, but if you're making loads of food like I am you'll definitely need more.

So buy more trays! My favorite are the Kiddo Feedo ones. Around $17.50 on Amazon. You probably only need two trays. These are great because they are silicone and therefore you can just pop out the food like an ice tray.

So you blend your baby food in a food processor, then pour it into the trays. Stick the trays in the freezer, then about 12-24 hours later pop out the "cubes" and put them in freezer bags labeled with food and date.

I've made all kind of food this way! It's great.

Usually for dinner I pop out 4 cubes onto a plate and then microwave them. I use these plates.


Here's a couple ideas for making food.

Peas (buy organic frozen, steam in bag)
Green Beans (buy organic frozen, steam in bag)
Sweet Potato (boil in water on stove or steam in microwave(20 mins)) (buy at your local grocery store or hit up a farmer's market)
Butternut Squash (boil, steam in microwave, or roast in oven) (buy at your local grocery store or hit up a farmer's market)
Apples (steam in microwave(5 mins)) (buy at your local grocery store or hit up a farmer's market)
Pears (steam in microwave(5 mins)) (buy at your local grocery store or hit up a farmer's market)
Avocado (no cooking!) (buy at your local grocery store)
Bananas (no cooking!) (buy at your local grocery store)
Peaches (no cooking!) (buy at your local grocery store or hit up a farmer's market)

6 Months!!!!

I can't believe my little man is 6 months now. He's getting sooo big!!!! I know everyone tells you time flys by so fast and it seriously does! I can't believe how grown up he's starting to look. He's even sitting up now!

When I first started this blog I told myself I was going to continue it after I had my kid. Ya well that's a lot harder than I thought. Working part-time, taking care of a baby, and attempting to make mommy friends takes up a TON of time! Luckily at least I'm having fun.

The first couple months home alone were definitely hard. Your baby doesn't even really interact with you at all. He just kind of sits there. Then life starts to get better with each smile, laugh, sound, etc. Yesterday while picking Avery up from my mom's house he even reached out his hands to me. I just wanted to melt right there. That's a pretty adorable gesture.

Some other info about not being pregnant anymore. The massive shedding finally stopped around 5.5 months which was glorious. I was literally finding tumbleweeds in my house of my hair! Also my wonderful pregnancy nails are GONE. Back to massive cracking and flaking.

Breastfeeding is still happening, just not going as well as I imagined. I feel like the older Avery gets the harder is gets. Half the time these days I hook him onto my boob and then he starts sucking for a little while then he pulls off and starts yelling at me.... Basically I assume he's saying "mommy this milk isn't coming out fast enough!" Great.... Sadly if it gets really bad I resort to giving him Similac Supplementing Formula. Yes I know mother's out there this isn't the greatest solution for my low milk supply these days, but a mom has to do what a mom has to do. I can't sit there and listen to him scream at me while I attempt to keep re-latching him. I'm still attempting to get rid of formula. Most days I can get through the entire day with no formula until nighttime. Then he just gets so hungry so I feed him one of those 2oz pre-mixed formulas. This and feeding him like a ton of mush food a night keeps him asleep for like 11 hours. Hmmm sleep is sooo good.

I've also pretty much given up pumping. I really hated it. I tried for a long time, but it just kept getting me frustrated. I would hook the entire machine up to myself and turn it on and I would end up with less than an ounce from each boob. OMG what a waste! Just seemed pointless. So now when he's with me I feed him from my boobs. Then when he isn't with me whoever is with him feeds him formula. Works well for us.

Back to feeding baby solids. I tried at 4 months. Didn't happen. So tried again at 4.5 months and it worked out much better. We went with the mushy rice/oatmeal cereal stuff by Gerber that you mix with breastmilk. It went pretty well for awhile until I realized Avery was pretty much never going number 2. So I started introducing other solids, mushed peaches, apples, pears, peas, sweet potatoes, butternut squash, prunes, and avocado. Got rid of the cereal all together and the whole bathroom issue fixed itself. Also prunes are a godsend. I make all his other food, but the prunes I buy. They are from Gerber in the plastic square boxes. We feed him a container of prunes at lunch now and then like 6 tablespoons of the other stuff at dinner. Works out pretty well. A well fed baby is a happy baby. As you can see in the photo above - my son's chunky cuteness.

Anyway hopefully I'll be able to write more often.