Chicken and carrots cooking in scratch chicken broth.
Salmon and kale.
Portioned out for the freezer.
Sometimes, it's even simpler: his favorite food, cut up and saved for later.
He approves mightily of the chicken blend.
I also blend up a lot of fruits, and mix them into either his infant cereal or plain, whole-fat yogurt. Bananas or applesauce with blueberries or raspberries, stuff like that. They taste good enough to add to my own yogurt or oatmeal. Regarding the infant cereal (an organic, heavily fortified wheat/oat blend), I've got mixed feelings. His pediatrician recommended using it at "two or three of his meals" for the iron, while explaining that many infants (especially breastfed infants) start to have lower iron levels at this age. I personally don't think that grain cereals are a very desirable food at this age, since without the added vitamins, they don't have much going for them. I'd rather he be eating fruits and veggies; meat, fish, eggs; and a little dairy (I mean other than the mama-dairy, of which he still takes copiously.) Having oatmeal three times a day seems excessive, so I compromised and included it in one meal per day. Then the doctor called back with the results from his blood work* and his iron was perfectly satisfactory, and that was before he'd been having any kind of cereal or fortified foods so it seems he was getting plenty before. (I guess my diet is satisfactory, too.) By then I was seduced, though, because with this stuff you just add plain water and stir! So easy! But something he was eating was making him sort-of constipated. I say sort-of because it didn't seem to be causing him any discomfort, but he was pooping very hard golf balls every few days, which just didn't seem right. I nixed the yogurt, nothing. Nixed the cereal, it got a little better. Finally went on a 24-hour all-breastmilk fast, which got him pooping like a baby again, but left me exhausted. Geez but this kid can eat. Now we're going to slowly reintroduce the cereal to see if it creates rock-poop again.
*This office checks iron levels and for the presence of lead as part of their nine-month routine. Robert turned up positive for lead (!) but that's another post.
2 comments:
Since about 7 months we've been just smashing cooked food with a spoon and giving it to him. He handles small pieces just fine, and now at 9 months he can handle bigger pieces too. You can probably ditch the food processor soon and just mash up whatever you're eating.
Also, sweet potatoes have iron.
Eh, Robert is a choker/ gagger, and has no teeth. That combined with us getting a pretty late start with solids... He seems to handle stuff better when it's really smooshed, although there have been many times when he's just gotten a bit of whatever I'm eating. He does love sweet potatoes. I think it's funny that the ped gave me the whole iron lecture, only to find that he wasn't even deficient.
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