We do but I wasn’t sure how many people did… it’s pretty easy to cook some stuff for the baby and mash it up or run it through the food processor. We put it in ice cube trays then move to bags so we have a variety of stuff ready. We also mash bananas, etc. We used jar food sometimes esp. when we’re out but it’s not a huge time saver at home and it’s significantly more expensive.
At this point, I’ve been lurking pregnancy boards, not mommy boards, but what really gets me about them–and, honestly, about the Sears books–is that there is a lot of talk about what people should feel. Feelings become a sort of litmus test of status. “You let them take your newborn to the nursery for 3 hours after 48 hours of labor and an emergency c-section? Wow. I guess that’s okay, but I can’t imagine letting my infant go. There’s no way I’d want to. I couldn’t bear to be parted from my “LO” at that point. But obviously YMMV.” The subtext is really “Your love for your child may vary”. The Sears books are full of references to how you natural mommy instincts will just well up and you’ll magically know your child’s every need.
I’ve always felt like jarred baby food is kind of a marketing scam. I mean, it’s nice for convenience and all, but a lot of people seem to think you cannot feed a baby solid foods that didn’t come out of a jar packaged by the Gerber corporation. It’s just mashed fruit and veg.
Those door-bouncer things are the BOMB, by the way. All of my kids have loved them.
They also seem adamant that there is no point at which you have exerted enough effort at “the right thing” to try something else. Breast feeding not working for you? Don’t you dare bottle feed! Not even if your baby is losing weight and can’t manage to latch! :dubious: I don’t care if the only way she eats is if I shoot formula at her with a potato cannon, if that is what I have to do to keep my baby healthy and fed then that is what I will do.* My baby staying alive and healthy is way more important to me than whether or not she breast feeds or co-sleeps or any of that stuff. I have a plan on how I’d like to do stuff but since the baby didn’t preapprove any of my ideas she may not agree to everything and we might just have to do some stuff her way and I am just fine with that.
*Please note-I do not anticipate a need to shoot formula at my child with a potato cannon.
Quoted for truth.
Re. making baby food: yeah, not a big deal, I do it. I steam the crap out of some cut-up fruit or a bag of frozen vegetables, then blitz it and freeze it in ice cube trays. It’s cheaper and some things taste better.
My daughter won’t take meats that I’ve done this way, though. Right now she needs Gerber’s ultra-fine texture for those.
Okay, time to take her for her vaccinations. Yay fun.
Please please please invent a formula potato-cannon and then post pictures of it in use. I am begging you here.
Caveat: I’m not now, never have been, and at my age, am not likely to ever be a parent. This is just something I’m curious about, because I am highly ignorant on the subject.
I keep hearing that babies/toddlers/young kids are supposed to be fed bland food because anything with spice could upset their stomachs. Yet we have multiple cultures all over the world whose cuisine is generally pretty spicy. Since the baby food industry is both relatively new and mostly a phenomenon of the western world, what did those babies get fed? Did the parents make a separate, bland portion, or did they just feed the kids a mushed up version of what they were having? And if the latter, is spice really that much of a problem?
My parents fed me liquefied roast dinners as a baby - having no teeth was apparently no reason not to partake in Sunday lunch 
I don’t think it’s a problem confined to baby boards, either - try going onto a video game forum and suggesting X console is greater than Y console. (Probably true of any forum - there’s doubtless a corner of the internet where discussion on which Bronte sister was best is a bannable offence.)
The first combined video game/mommy board will be likely to create flame wars visible from space.
My father-in-law, who’s a food scientist, apparently fed my husband and his sister curries and the like when they were very little, and they seemed to manage fine - in fact I suspect it’s the reason that they’re now their stable diet. But I’m still not sure I want to attempt the same with my baby, at least not when she’s very tiny. For one thing, I seem to be incapable of making either dish without it being blow-your-head-off spicy, which I doubt is a good thing for a baby, and for another, even if the baby’s fine with it, I’m not sure I’m fine with changing its nappy afterwards!
We flavor up the kids food a bit – cinnamon, even curry powder – to make his life more interesting. He likes it. We started around six months.
He’ll eat anything some of the time and nothing all of the time.
UR A botel-whore fagg lol… UR kidz r gonna SUX DIX 4 crack LOL lik u do FAGGIT…
Sorry, just preparing for the future.
My friend was all gung ho to make her own baby food, but unfortunately her baby categorically refuised to eat whatever she made, even if she made the EXACT same thing as something the baby previously liked (ie, mashed butternut squash).
We like to give her a hard time about the baby food situation – “HAHA your baby will only eat processed foods!!!” – but only because she laughs and says “shaddup, you assholes.”
Whatever. The point is, whatever works, works. Just roll with it.
ETA, when I was born in 1975, my parents would just take wheatever they were having for dinner, stuff it in the blender, and feed it to me. Apparently I liked liver.
A baby who drinks breastmilk will often get more of a taste for flavor variety if the mom eats a lot of highly seasoned food. Or so I’m told. I never noticed much of a difference in how excited/not excited she was about nursing depending on what I ate.
I lightly season the food I make for my 7 month old - usually cinnamon, garlic, or rosemary. She seems fine. I do (usually) season it separately from the food I am making for our dinner, because we use salt and I don’t think she needs that much salt (another option would be if we ate healthier and used less salt, but I can’t really be bothered with that).
I know that jarred baby food was a big, big deal in the 60s and 70s, at least, as the handyman magazines kept saying that they were PERFECT for all sorts of tiny handyman bits (things like bolts and washers). And women’s magazines and columns also noted that these jars were perfect for craft and sewing notions. Apparently many households had a lot of the jars piling up.
The jars are very convenient, especially if the other people in the family eat a lot of raw veggies. But these days, it’s a rare household that doesn’t have a microwave or other way of cooking a small amount of food to mush. Even way back when, it was easy to cook food until it fell apart.
I really liked the door bouncer thingie. I’d put Lisa in it when I had to fix dinner, so that after we ate, she’d be ready for a bath and then go to sleep.
Seriously. My daughter was one of those babies. Breastfeeding just didn’t work–aside from her problems with latching and falling asleep, it hurt me so much that I couldn’t let down. You know what? Breastfeeding may be natural but that doesn’t mean every mother and baby will thrive on it. My daughter had to take formula. In an earlier time, she would have been nursed by another mother or died.
Which is why I threw away every baby book I had that said “to breastfeed, don’t keep any formula in the house!”
I made food- but up to a point.
Always had a few jars for when I forgot/ran out/ couldn’t be bothered/wanted to eat something irishbaby doesn’t like.
Now, she eats what we eat, but every so often (if she won’t eat it, I want to make a hot curry, or we’re getting takeout after she goes to bed) she’ll get baked beans or fish fingers or something.
I think the healthiest approach to parenting is :
Do what suits you and works, forget what doesn’t, don’t second guess yourself, don’t sweat the small stuff.
My own a la carte approach is:
Elective c-section
Exclusive breastfeeding for 14 months (solid food from 6 months).
Co-sleeping til 3 months- own bed in own room thereafter
Neglect-o-matic and door bouncer (both awesome) but no playpen (didn’t need it)
Pampers and Huggies, not cloth
Mostly homemade babyfood, with pre-made as required.
Returned to work at 6 months
Attachment(ish- but no slings because irishbaby hated them (I just held or carried her).
YMMV.
With our second I think I made one or two batches of homemade food. He wasn’t much interested in it, and I was exhausted and not much interested in trying to force the issue. He stayed on breastmilk until he could handle feeding himself soft table foods.
With the next two I’ll probably be handing them a rib or something at seven months, if the trend continues.
Hey, I like irishgirl’s idea of an a-la-carte list.
My own:
- Wanted natural childbirth, but labor dumped me directly into transition-strength contractions with a stuck, face-up baby. Had a c-section under general anesthesia.
- Wanted to exclusively breastfeed, couldn’t, stopped after 2 weeks. Wanted to keep pumping, got two rounds of mastitis and couldn’t let down/dried up/got fed up, stopped after 6 weeks.
- Mimi has slept in her crib in her room since day 1
- A little television can’t hurt, so she watches Sesame Street while I shower every day
- I’m making baby food because it’s cheaper, we use jars when we travel. She also gets a portion of our dinner to do what she will with (she mushes it up and drops it in her lap, right now)
- Never had any intention of cloth diapering
- She never tolerated the sling or front pack, so she has mostly traveled in her bucket seat
- Playpen yes, exersaucer yes, bouncy chair yes
- Quit my job to stay home with her
Breastfeeding is good, and I find it odd the way it was largely abandoned and then treated as outre. Unfortunately, a surprising number of people have become piping dickholes in the other direction. I try to remain merely sad and frustrated about it rather than actually angry. But that’s not nearly the end of the bullshit.
I for one set no store by the suspiciously hippy-sounding notion that skin contact is magically better than hugging the baby with your shirt on. The things we’re sure make a difference: to hold, to make eye contact, to play, to speak to the baby continuously, to make sure the little beast knows he’s not crying out to an uncaring vacuum. And there’s some stuff about diapers, but that’s the maintenance stuff that just has to be done. All this other business with the hysterical standards and the guilt trips is just the cultish mania of flagellants.
Huh. Mine comes out more crunchy than I thought it would be.
-Co-slept till a year with both of them
-Did crying-it-out several times at different ages so they’d go to sleep on their own
-Breastfed long term. Weaned the first at twenty months (he promptly got Type 1 diabetes, little twirp) and haven’t weaned the second one yet
-Made my own baby food and did child-led weaning
-Disposable diapers
The older kid gets an hour or more of videos a day, plus plays Starfall and the Thomas website, so I can have some quiet
–Did babywearing all the time with the second, mostly in an Ergo