Help me feed my babies

Cafe Society
1

I just need some ideas.

I have 18 month old twins. They’re pretty good eaters but I find I give them the same things over and over. I cook them dinner and it usually consists of the following;
Grains – pasts, rice, or whole grain bread
Vegetable – peas, corn, broccoli, asparagus, or carrots
Protein - chicken breast or lean ground beef.

This doesn’t lend itself to too many combinations. Sometimes we’ll give them some cheese or tofu just for something different, but other than that it’s a pretty boring menu.

What can I add to this?
What do you feed little ones?
Anyone have any favorite recipes?

2

Ours eat lots of fruit. Strawberries, grapes, raisins, and bananas mostly. Keeps 'em regular. We give them yogurt, too, but at that age most of it will end up other places besides their mouths, so it might be something you insist on feeding to them yourselves. We make smoothies from time to time.

They also take great interest in what’s on our plates even if it’s the same thing that’s on their plates. For instance they’ll be ambivalent about the peanut butter toast I put in front of them but when I sit down with mine, they’re all over me. So I’ll put a big hunk of peanut butter on my plate for them to dip their fingers or better yet a banana into.

They don’t eat raw cheese much, but they love melted cheese so whenever I make cheese toast or grilled cheese I’ll make some for them. Usually they’ll just pick off the melted cheese bits and leave the bread behind, but that’s fine.

They often have Cream of Wheat for breakfast. Eggs are sort of a crapshoot.

3

Feed 'em whatever *you *eat. (Cut to appropriate size to prevent choking, of course.) There’s no need to make them special meals, and it’s a lot easier and better for them if you don’t. They’ll naturally get more variety (unless your own diet sucks, and if that’s the case, remove that mote from your eye) and learn to like a wider variety of flavors and textures, which will help them in the future.

Some of WhyBaby’s favorite meals and snacks:

Avacado sandwhiches - ripe avacado spread on whole grain bread with a sprinkling of salt. Sometimes we smear some salsa on it for extra kick. Fabulous brain-building fats in avacadoes.

Scrambled eggs with salsa “dip”. (We’re into the dipping age - pretty much anything that can be dipped will be eaten.)

Ham and cheese and whole grain bread cubes. She doesn’t like them in a sandwhich shape, so I just cube 'em with a pizza slicer and toss them in a bowl.

Toasty hearts - “invented” for my picky neice and now a family staple. Toasted whole grain bread with a thin layer of peanut butter. Then cut out heart shapes with a cookie cutter. (Keep the peanut butter thin, or it’s a choking hazard.) Orange segments on the side.

Neufchâtel cheese (the “lowfat cream cheese”) with some real fruit spread on whoel grain crackers. (Also a good hors d’oeuvres for parties - put a block of Neufchâtel or cream cheese on a plate and dump some fruit preserves on top and serve with crackers. They always think it’s some exotic and expensive soft French cheese!)

Sliced apples dipped in thinned out peanut butter - mix a spoonful of peanut butter with some water, and let them dip away. When they’re a little older, you can just smear peanut butter on the apple slices directly.

Sliced red and green bell peppers and peapods dipped in ranch dressing. I’m nervous about carrot sticks, but her brother gave her some last week and she did fine, so those will get added to the dish.

Cheerios mixed with whole-milk yogurt (Stonyfield makes whole milk yogurt, and kids under two should not eat lowfat mlk or yogurt unless your doctor says otherwise.) She’s too little to eat cereal with milk in it like Daddy, but the yogurt makes it stick to her spoon and is the perfect training tool! I use about 1/3 of a cup of cereal and one of the little 4 oz. YoBaby yogurts.

Mandarin orange slices, canned pears and peaches and pineapple and fruit cocktail. I find that ethnic stores tend to have more of this stuff in juice, as opposed to sugar syrup.

The pizza slicer is a Godsend for quickly cutting food into toddler portions. Much faster than using a knife.

4

Part of the problem is that my diet isn’t that good right now, but that’s because of a lack of time to cook, not because I’m picky. The dinners I outlined in the OP can be prepared in under 30 min. which is about all the time I have between getting home from work and dinner time for the babies.

Another issue is that my wife wants them to eat only organic food for the first 2 years and that stuff is EXPENSIVE! The twins don’t actually eat that much so it’s not a huge financial burden, but if made all the family’s meals by shopping at Whole Foods it could add up quickly.

5

At 18 months, shouldn’t they still be breastfeeding?

6

They can be, but in my estimation (observing my 20 month-old and the familes around me with young’ns) it’s pretty rare by 18 months. Aren’t the experts recommending one year for breastfeeding at this point?

My daughter pretty much eats what we do, which means we’re tasked with getting our own diets in better shape so hers can be too. One of these days Junior and I will both be sitting at the table hours after dinnertime has ended with our arms folded and pouty looks on our faces. Can’t get up until we finish our vegetables my ass! :smiley:

7

Could she be convinced that Farmer’s Markets are as good or better than Whole Foods? Green City Market is a good one that has winter hours and features locally sustainably grown organics. They’re not *always *cheaper than Whole Foods, but they very often are. Here are more lists of farmer’s markets in the Chicagoland area, as well as a shopping guide. (I love buying good food right from the growers rather than paying for the rent at Whole Foods!)

You can get away with eating poorly for another month or two, but pretty soon they’re going to start demanding the food the grown-ups are eating, because they want to be “big like Daddy!” If you’re eating junk, they’ll view that junk as the “good, special, big people’s food!” and it will be coveted. :smiley:

I’m looking for more veggie ideas for WhyBaby. Her vegetable intake is pretty limited, mostly because I don’t know a lot of interesting things to do with vegetables (I grew up in a frozen vegetable microwaved, add a pat of butter and serve household) and she likes really strong flavors, which most veggies aren’t.

Quartz, most people in the US start introducing solids by 6 months (some doctors recommend as early as 4 months for certain kids), and breastfeeding at 18 months in the US is mostly supplemental, not exclusive - often only for comfort, not nutrition. (If it’s still going on at all. In 2003, only 5.7% of babies were getting any breastmilk at all by the age of 18 months. ) 18 monthers are generally eating a wide variety of foods. Here’s a good chart from Dr. Sears.

Slacker, doctors recommend “at least” one year of breastfeeding, and as you can see by the goals at the kellymom link, that’s about as far as anyone has any hope for at this point! (The 2010 goal is for 25% of babies to still be nursing at 12 months.)

8

I would expand your vegetable range. My daughter loves pumpkin, sweet potatoes, artichokes (we had to help her a lot at first), raw or cooked onions, turnips, baby corn, olives, green and black, capers, sweet peppers, hot peppers, mushrooms, and squash. She likes to eat many more vegetables than I do. The vegetables we cook can be baked or grilled or steamed and are fairly easy to fix. She loves fish and seafood. She was about the age of your twins when she popped an entire baby octopus in her mouth and ate it at a tapas restaurant.

One of our favorites is to chop up some peppers, mushrooms, onions, and zucchini and some meat and grill it in butter and spices, add some canned stock, thicken with corn starch or a roux and serve with brown rice. Not exciting, but it gets me to eat vegetables.

She also loves cheese. A nice slice of sharp cheddar or mild provelone or munster, some fresh vegetables and some condiments on the side, like pickles, olives, or capers made a nice lunch.

At that age size was more important than what was cooked. We made sure we did not give her foods of a size that would choke her and encouraged that she take small bites.

We do give her lots of fruit, but very little fruit juice.

9

I used Cream of Wheat a LOT. CoW + vanilla yogurt + applesauce = baby gold. I usually added a sprinkle of cinnamon. Plus you can mix up pieces of small cut fruit or mash them if your kids don’t have many teeth. Peanut butter on banana pieces. My kids also looooved ravioli by that point.

10

We never did anything terribly interesting with vegetables. Sometimes a bit of hollandaise sauce from a packet, or some butter or homemade cheese sauce (made from cheese, cream, a dash of dry mustard and white pepper). For artichokes we boil them and serve them with lemon butter. Baby corn or peas she will eat cold straight from the can and gets very upset if you try to cook them. She teethed on frozen broccoli.

I breastfed my daughter until she was two and a half, but started adding solid food at about 7 months.

11

Yeah, I forgot about apples. Apples and applesauce (unsweetened) are big. They both like corn and one likes broccoli.

Keep in mind that eventually their tastes will diverge, if they haven’t already. Something else to add to your experiments. For instance for mine we’ll have spaghetti and meat sauce - but one girl likes spaghetti and meat but no sauce and the other likes spaghetti and sauce but no meat. I think one of my girls would be perfectly happy if we just gave her a slab of smart balance spread and a slab of cream cheese. And maybe a little ketchup and parmesan cheese on the side. That’s it - make everything look like a condiment!