Making your own baby food

I'm a cheap frugal person.  If I can (easily) do something for way cheaper, I will do it.  Since my whole adult life I've either been a student or a stay-at-home parent, so after studying and chores are done, finding ways to produce stuff for less is a good economic use of my time.  I'm not a couponer or anything, but I generally cook my own food and shop sales.

That's part of the reason why I nurse (it's so much healthier, and formula makes poop smell gross, and formula costs money, and bottles are equipment I'll have to wash, and I'm just lazy like that!) and that's why I don't buy baby food.

I was at the grocery store the other day, and I happened to walk by the baby food aisle.  Now that Mace is eating solids (and boy, is he eating!!) I buy rice cereal to mix in with stuff, but that's it.  I figure a couple dollars for a big box of ... powdered rice/oats (whatever!) ... is an okay thing to spend money on.  I can't make it myself.  But then I look at the baby food, and think, "75 cents for a baby's-fist's-sized jar of ... peas?  I can buy a whole POUND of frozen peas for a buck!!"  How hard is it to boil some peas and stick 'em in a blender?

I guess then the question is, "If you make your own baby food ... do you have to make it in small batches or something so it doesn't go bad before your baby gets around to eating it?  Jars of baby food are preserved."  Simple solution: Freeze it!  When Carmen was a baby, I read that you can put your homemade baby food into ice cube trays and freeze them.  Then when it's time to eat, you just thaw the food cubes in the microwave and feed them to your baby.  Voila!  I fill ice cube trays with pureed food, then when they're frozen I transfer them into a big plastic Ziploc bag so I can make another batch of baby food.  Easy peasy.

This is the website I use as my guide for feeding my baby.  I love it, and it gives me ideas of the new foods I can introduce to my baby and when.

Mace started eating food at the beginning of November (he was about 6.5 months old).  We started with rice cereal mixed with milk, then introduced applesauce and bananas and zucchini and whatnot.  Applesauce is easy because you can buy it in BIG jars.  Just be sure to buy applesauce that's just apples and not sugar.

Sometimes Mace wasn't a big fan of the new food I'd introduce to him.  So I'd put the new food into a bowl of applesauce-rice and feed him mostly applesauce and a little bit of the new food, then increase the amount of the new food in each spoonful until he was eating the new food without complaint.  Other times, I'll take one thawed cube of food (carrots, zucchini, sweet potato, whatever) and mix it into a big bowl of applesauce.  I figure the flavors are mild enough that he won't notice the difference, and most of his nutrition comes from milk anyway.  Supposedly.  That kid eats so much it makes me wonder how he packs it all down (but he refuses to nurse more ... he wants food and squawks for it!). :p

I love how communicative Mace is about food.  When he wakes up in the morning, I nurse him, and about 20 minutes later we all have breakfast together.  Usually Mark makes bacon and eggs (sometimes I do) and I put Mace in his high chair.  He bounces around and kicks his legs and smiles and grunts at us, and when I *finally* have his food ready, he LUNGES at the spoon and gobbles up whatever I'm feeding him.  And when he's still hungry, he grunts at me and cries.  If we're out somewhere and he's hungry and he sees us eating, he cries and reaches towards the food and growls "Rawwwrr, aaarrrgggghhhh!!!  Um-um-um-um!!" until I let him have a little taste of whatever I'm eating that is OK for him to eat (if I'm eating out, I always try to order something that contains something Mace-friendly, or I stick a banana and a spoon in my diaper bag.) and then he lets out this really cute content noise, like, "Aaaahhh, mmmm-nom."

And it kind of makes my heart burst with love for him.

One of my favorite foods to feed him is banana, because we cut the banana in half and scoop the fruit out with a spoon.  It's very self-contained and easy to do.  Some people like giving their babies solid foods in little pieces to play with in their hands and feed themselves ... but I think that's very messy, so I'd rather be a clean control freak and spoon-feed them myself.  When Mace gets teeth, I'll give him little bits of food he can chew on (like red bell peppers) that won't get all mushy and messy and gross.

Our schedule goes something like this:
Morning - nurse, breakfast
Then I try to go to the gym after he takes a brief nap
Noonish - nurse, lunch
Afternoon nurse
He takes a short nap at some point in the afternoon, either before or after the afternoon nursing, depending on when he gets cranky
Evening - nurse, dinner, bed.

Most of the time, the food is some kind of combination of vegetable cube mixed with applesauce, and half a banana.  Mace eats 1-2 bananas a day. O.o  And yet he still poops (bananas and applesauce can constipate.)

Random fact of the day: applesauce constipates (you lose a lot of the fiber when you peel apples) but apple juice helps loosen things up (because of the liquids and sugar).  Both are made of apples, but have different effects.  But if you REALLY need to help your kid empty their bowels, PRUNE JUICE.  You can either give it to them in a bottle, or mix it with baby cereal.  Rice cereal will also contribute to constipation, so you might want to switch to oat cereal.

Okay, enough about poop.

My kid sleeps from 7 to 7.  Sometimes even later.  HOW DID I GET SO LUCKY?!  And he started sleeping through the night in September, after we moved into our house and gave him his own room (instead of, you know, our closet.)

I used to wake Mace up to nurse him around 10 or 11 before I went to bed (you know how cows love to be milked in the morning and feel uncomfortable?  I HAVE SO MUCH EMPATHY FOR COWS.  YOU MEN HAVE NO IDEA.) but then there were a few nights where Mace was not interested in nursing and seemed cranky that I would wake him up in the middle of the night.  Your body adjusts to your nursing times, so now I no longer get SO uncomfortable at night right before I get to bed.

I love having a 7-month-old.  They are so much fun, and expressive, and playful, and AWESOME.  Sometimes I wish he wasn't so clingy, but the nice thing is that since he has an older sister and two cats, there are bunch of other people around to entertain him.  I just can't leave him in the same room as Carmen for a long time, because eventually she leaves and he gets lonely and upset.  He can craw, but he hasn't yet figured out how to switch ROOMS.  He'll just beeline towards a toy and stuff it in his mouth.

Well, it's either a toy or it's cat food.  NOM NOM NOM.

Spoilers!!

A few days ago, Mark came home from work super-giddy and told me what he weighed when he got on the scale when he got to the gym that morning.  I really wish I could remember how much he weighed when we got married ... I think he's close!  So far (in just a month) he has lost 20 pounds.  That's even more than our cats!!  (Our cats are fat.)  I want to take a picture of Mark holding Tiber, with the caption of, "This is how much Mark weighed a month ago!"

I, on the other hand, lost 7 pounds in a week (how is it possible? I don't know. Going off carbs is crazy!) and then realized I shouldn't be losing weight that fast because I'm nursing.  I was supposed to be eating fruit, too.  And if you've got sugar in your body, it has energy it can access before your body starts shedding fat so even eating fruit will slow your weight loss.  At least that's what I suspect.  So now I'm down just over 10 pounds.  So between the two of us, we've almost lost a Carmen.  In a month.

I've been pretty bad the past few days, though.  I've been craving chocolate so I had several pieces of chocolate cake at a friend's house last night, and today I've been sneaking a bunch of Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies.  I promise I'll get back on track tomorrow!

One thing that was really fun about that first week was stepping on the scale in the evening and weighing less than I weighed in the morning, even though I had been eating all day long and never felt hungry.  Gee, funny, you eat foods that keep you full and you don't get hungry as often.  Hm!!

It makes me think that maybe that, instead of simply writing up how many calories are in a food item, if they wrote it in something like calories per hour.  You digest carbs faster than whole grains/proteins/fats, so although fat has more calories per weight, I bet if you ate more fat during the day you'd eat fewer calories overall.  Carbs last, like, three hours, then you're hungry again.  They also spike your blood sugar and make you even hungrier.  I noticed I could be not-very-hungry, then I'll have something with sugar in it, and suddenly my body will start craving more sugar.

Yup, here's a little something describing cravings vs. hunger.  This is why you have to do Phase I of the South Beach Diet.  It's what kicks the carb cravings.  The first 3 days are the hardest.
http://www.southbeachdiet.com/diet/hunger-versus-cravings


I've decided I also need to come up with some sort of official "goal" for my weight loss, instead of, "The doctor told Mark he needs to lose weight, so what the heck I'll do it with him because I'm fat."

Here goes, once it's public and people know they've got something to hold you to ... right?

Starting weight: 179
Current weight: 169
Pre-Mace weight: 165
Pre-Carmen weight: 160

In my wildest, wildest dreams I'd like to be down to 140 lbs (how much I weighed when I was 16) and have a 30-inch waist or smaller.  Actually, I'd just like to have a 30-inch waist, period.  (I'm already one inch down!)  Realistically, I'd like to get down to 150 lbs, which is what I weighed when I graduated from high school.  I have clothes I've been holding onto since I got married, hoping I'll be able to fit into them comfortably again.  (Problem is, many of them aren't nursing-friendly so I've hardly worn them since 2008.  BUT I LOVE THOSE SHIRTS SO MUCH I CAN NOT GET RID OF THEM BECAUSE I SWEAR I WILL WEAR THEM AGAIN SOME DAY! **stubborn**)

It's kind of embarrassing thinking those are my weight goals, because I have friends who are like 140 or 145 and want to get down to 120 and I'm thinking, "How is that even POSSIBLE?!  I haven't weighed that I was 13!  And I was not fat then!"  (Back then, I'm pretty sure was pure muscle, and I could probably beat the crap out of you, and I rode my bike everywhere.)

And there's your way too much personal information about Kamis for the day.  Now I will be super-embarrassed if Christmas comes around and I'm still 160something. "You did so great in August, then you gave up?!"

Crazy life and health and stuff ...

So this past month has been crazy (crazy fun?)  I went to Utah for a week with the kids to celebrate my grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary.  I was able to meet up with a few of my friends and have a lot of fun.  It was nice having extra help with the kids ... Mom doesn't get much sleep when she's sleeping in the same room as both of her kids.  Anyway.  Hopefully some day I'll be able to see the nice family photos we took.


Since Mark got a new job last year, we've been thinking about buying additional life insurance.  Someone came by with an interesting investment thing where it's like part of it is life insurance and part of it is an investment with a guaranteed 2% return and a 12% cap, and it's got some kind of tax shelter associated with it because of the kind of investment it is.  (Fair Tax, FAIR TAX, why can people make up stuff like this??!!!)

Anyway, in case you don't know, when you sign up for life insurance they come and weigh you and take your blood and test it for stuff to make sure you're not about to die from cancer.  When Mark got his blood work back, his levels came back high for stuff that could be related to his liver.  The life insurance company wasn't worried about that at all (but they were concerned about his Factor V Leiden, a blood clotting disorder we already know about which is not a big deal but whatever) but they couldn't give us a better deal than we already have on Mark's life insurance (yay, BYU alumni stuff!!) so we decided we'll get healthier and try again later for additional term life insurance.

Looking at the liver stuff, though, we decided to go see a doctor to figure out what's going on and what we can do.  After a few doctor's visits and ultrasounds and whatnot, the doctor suggested Mark is developing a fatty liver and told him the best way to treat it would be to lose weight and go on a low-carb diet, "such as Atkins or South Beach."

So I'd heard of Atkins before, but not South Beach, and I was kind of excited that now we HAVE to get healthy because a doctor told Mark to lose weight.  We've been half-heartedly "eating healthy" and working out, but we haven't really bothered to lose much weight because, heck, it's not like we've had to buy bigger clothes lately.  And being pregnant gave me an excuse to not fit into anything anyway. ;)

I have a hard time figuring out what to cook (we love stir fry with lots of rice) because neither Mark nor I particularly like vegetables (stir-fry is the only way we're eating any) and Mark is allergic to half the fruits under the sun (apples, pears, peaches, cherries, pretty much anything with a pit...) So ... whatever.

Anyway, at the beginning of the month, Mark decided to cut down on carbs.  Carmen wanted me to bake a birthday cake for her ponies (why not?) and Mark only ate a piece or two of it.  I would make stir fry, and he would skip the rice.  Stuff like that.  I checked out a bunch of South Beach Diet books from the library and told him to skim through the recipes and find stuff he wanted to try (turns out he doesn't want any of it. All of the recipes are kind of specific and use weird ingredients we wouldn't use otherwise.  Plus, they advocate the use of sugar substitutes.  Blech, frankenfoods!)

We decided we would "officially" start our diet after I got back from vacation.  I mean, there's no way I'm going to NOT eat the tortilla from my Cafe Rio salad, and I AM going to go to JCW's!!  Neither of those places exist in Texas!  A few days before I left (my vacation started on a Tuesday) Mark decided he was "officially" starting the South Beach Diet.

The way the SBD works is at the beginning, for 2 weeks, you cut all carbs out of your diet.  No bread, no potatoes, no pasta, no sugar, NO FRUIT.  They have some other guidelines, too, like you're supposed to only have reduced-fat milk and cheese and you're supposed to have a limit on the number of pistachios/cashews/etc you can eat, and I *think* they recommend Canadian bacon over regular bacon (Mark hates Canadian bacon) ... and Mark pretty much ignored that and went with the parts of the diet he agreed with that sounded ... well ... more sound.  There is some diet/nutrition stuff we don't necessarily buy into.  I'm not about to go below 2% milk because of the stuff they do to milk when you get down to 1% and skim.  Mark is not convinced normal bacon is worse for you than frankenfooded bacon.

Supposedly, the goal of Phase 1 of the South Beach diet is to not spike your blood sugar, and hopefully get your blood chemistry back to normal.  It will also kick your sugar/carb cravings.  Carbs are easy energy and not very filling.  Processed carbs are practically predigested for you, so you get lots of energy for little effort and maybe it helps you gain weight in your belly.  Come to think of it, the skinny people I knew eat very few refined carbs and have lots of fiber ... so they might be onto something there.

So, now it's the end of August and we've had a little bit of a taste of a change of lifestyle ... Want to know how it went?  Stay tuned!