Making Your Own Baby Food: Questions

Oh, bloggy friends, I have so many questions about making baby food. I borrowed a bunch of books from the library about making your own baby food and it only left me with more questions. Some of them even say opposite things from each other.

Jayden will be 6 months old in less than two weeks (eeeeek!).....

So, to those of you who have done it, HELP!!

Please give me all the advice you have.

Is a special baby food machine that steams and purees worth buying?

Or should I stick with a regular steamer and our food processor?

If I use the food processor, is a food mill necessary?

Is it okay to make everything in big batches and freeze? Or do some things not freeze well? How long can purees stay in the freezer?

How do you heat up your frozen purees?

Any other advice that you have? Random things you learned from doing it yourself?

Thank you so much in advance for your help!!!

5 Months

Birth:

1 Month:

2 Months:

3 Months:

4 Months:

5 Months:

In the last couple weeks Jayden has learned how to get up on his hands and knees and rock back and forth.

Just in the last two days he started being able to sit up on his own!



We started cereal last week. If you want to see the video, check out the Jayden's First Cereal post.

He loves his jumperoo. 

He still loves his seahorse. Although we need to get new batteries because seahorse sounds like he is drowning. It's creepy.

He has started using teethers.



He had his first bath in the big tub!

 He loves looking at himself in the mirror.

We have a framed picture of Jayden on our end table in the living room and whenever I sit with him on the couch next to it, he looks at it and gets a smile on his face. Sometimes he even "talks" to it like he's flirting. He does the same thing when I show him pictures of babies or young children in books.

He loves the kids I work with. He won't nap while they are here. It's even hard to feed him a bottle because he has to watch everything they are doing.

It seems like he is learning something new everyday. A couple weeks ago Adam was leaving for work and he waved to Jayden. Jayden waved back! We both couldn't believe it.

He has started to really pay attention to the cats. We can't wait to start taking him to the zoo when it gets a little warmer.

We weighed him on my parents' Wii Fit and he is about 13.5 pounds now. Other than some pajamas that are size 3 months, he is now wearing almost all 3-6 and 6 month clothing! Although I don't think his pants would stay up if it weren't for his cloth diapers.

Jayden is a happy and healthy 5 month old baby boy and we are so head over heals in love with him.

Jayden's First Cereal

We were at Target last week and I couldn't resist buying this:

Then last night we tried it for the first time!!!

I was so excited for how well he did. I made it using one tablespoon of cereal and three tablespoons of formula and he ate the entire thing! We may get some chub on this kid after all. :)

Happy Valentine's Day!!

After I went to bed last night Adam made chocolate covered strawberries. How cute is that? When I woke up there was a plate with the strawberries and a red heart balloon. :)

What are your Valentine's Day plans? Did you celebrate over the weekend? Are you doing something special tonight?

You Write the Caption

To get you through your Friday afternoon, I thought it would be fun to do some funny caption writing. Aaaaand.....go!

Jayden's Big Injury

You may not be able to see it in this picture without enlarging it...but look what happened to my baby's eye!!!

He woke up from a nap on Saturday and I noticed his eye was a little red. A little while later it was even more red and I realized there was a tiny scratch right there on his eye ball!! He must have done it during his nap.

I freaked out and called his doctor's office. It was a Saturday night so I knew I would just be getting the answering service.

While I waited for a doctor to call me back, Adam was consulting Dr. Google. He was reading out loud everything he found and I was getting really scared.

I started packing a bag to take to the hospital. All of a sudden my mommy packing skills kicked in. (I didn't know I had them.) That bag had everything we could possibly need if we had to spend hours in a hospital.

From everything Adam was reading, I was pretty sure Jayden was going blind as we waited for the call.

A nurse called just as I was thinking about the glass eye he would need.

She said if it happened during nap it was probably just a superficial scratch. She said we could call our doctor's office in the morning if it got worse overnight.

(One of the things she told me would be a sign of it getting worse was blurry vision. How in the world do you find out if your 4 month old has blurry vision? Ask him?)

By the morning, it was starting to look a little better.

By the time our pediatrician called us Monday morning to check in about what happened, I could barely see anything. By Tuesday, it was completely gone.

So....new moms worry a lot, huh?

hehe

Intervention

I may need an intervention.

I spend abnormal amounts of time on Snapfish.

I order prints for Jayden's birth mother every month and every single time I go crazy. It's so hard to narrow down which ones to make prints of. I keep thinking I am going to work on Jayden's scrapbook so I might as well get the prints for it now. So every month I order a lot of prints. So many prints that if I used them all, he would have 19 filled scrapbooks and he is only 4 months old.

I realized that the only way for the prints to come out good is to crop and lighten them on the snapfish website, which takes hours. It's worth it though because I tried prints at many places with some horrible results. They were so bad at Walmart that my Mom brought them a picture of what Jayden really looks like and they refunded all my money. I was beginning to consider going back to film and making a dark room in our basement.

After Halloween I ordered a magnet of Jayden in his Halloween costume. Adorable. Of course my parents needed one for their fridge too.

I spent a full week working on our Christmas card. Trying different card formats, changing which pictures I used, cropping the pictures in different ways...days and days of playing around with one Christmas card.

Then I decided to make a photo book for my parents to give to them as a Christmas present. I had a coupon code that was going to expire so I spent 5 hours in one day working on the book. Which I acknowledge is insane. (But in my defense, they loved it.)

When I got an e-mail with a coupon code for Valentine's Day cards, how could I resist? I immediately started thinking about how I could dress him in his red cloth diaper and it would make for a cute card. (I sent them out last week and I LOVE THEM.) He's only a baby once, right?

Adam pointed out that Jayden has already been photographed more in 4 months than Adam has been his entire life. I think he's probably right. He has very few pictures from his childhood. I, on the other hand, grew up with a photographer as a father. And Jayden has a photographer Grandfather. And an Aunt and Uncle who love photography. And then there is me who wants to remember every minute with this baby. So, yes, he may be the most photographed baby on the planet.

I don't have plans to stop anytime soon. You can't make me. :P

(I wonder how Jayden would look on a mug.....)

Snow Storm Update

The good news is that we never lost power.

The bad news is that despite the storm not really hitting us, schools closed and I had kids here all day. It was far less snow than other days when the kids have had school. Schools closed from media hype, not actual snow.

The other bad news is that there were places in the North East that it did hit hard, so Adam's catastrophe unit at work was activated. He technically can so no to the long hours, but we really need the money right now so we are in no position to turn down overtime.

I have always had mixed feelings about him being activated. The money helps, but I miss him.

This is the first long activation he has had since Jayden was born. As much as I didn't like it before, I hate it now. He is basically only sleeping here while this is going on.

I had kids here all day yesterday, which meant Jayden fought naps all day so he wouldn't miss a single thing the kids did. By the time all the kids were gone, Jayden was a crying, whining mess. (Why is it the more overtired the baby is, the harder they fight sleep?)

Our weekend plans are cancelled because he will most likely be working straight through the weekend too.

All I can say is, I give single parents all the credit in the world. That is something I have thought about since the day Jayden came home from the hospital. I don't know how they do it. Adam and I make a good parenting team. I don't know what I would do if I didn't have someone to share the parenting with. It has to be so hard.

Snow Storm Anxiety

Apparently the storm of the century is headed this way.

Usually there is nothing that scares me more than a snowday. It means all of a sudden I have a house full of kids all day long because they don't have school. I get a call at 5 AM and I am scrambling to get ready for a full day of activities, snacks, meals, and crazy kids.

Everyone is wondering whether school will be closed tomorrow. It's all over Facebook right now. It takes a lot for schools to close around here.

THE SUSPENSE IS KILLING ME!! I just want to know!

But, as much as school closings are on my mind, the thing I am really worried about is losing power.

We don't lose power very often, but with a baby in the house now, it's made us nervous about it. It's funny how things change. We've never given a power outage a second thought.

Tonight we found our corded phone that we have for emergencies and plugged it in to a phone jack. (Since our cordless phones woudln't work without power.) I've made sure my cell phone is fully charged. (If there is a power outtage, it's important I still have a way to tweet, hehe.)

We have gathered all the candles in the house and put them in one place, along with candle lighters.

We made sure the batteries in the flashlight work.

Adam checked the pantry and decided we could live for months on what was in there.

We have about two weeks of formula and plenty of water.

I washed all the cloth diapers and wipes tonight.

So, we are ready. Ready as we'll ever be.

I hate going to bed not knowing what I will wake up to....

One thing is for sure. We will be doing a lot of shoveling tomorrow.