Easy (ish) Baby Food

I have been thinking of what solid foods to feed my baby since way before I had her. I think it started when I saw all of the Baby Bullet infomercials. I thought, can it really be that easy to make my own?  

There are many reasons to make your own baby food. There are many who say it is cost effective, and it probably is.  Others like knowing exactly what is in their child's food. Others say that it leads kids to love new tastes and textures so that they are more willing to try new foods when they get older. 

I decided I would try it. 

There were many reasons why I wouldn't try it under different circumstances. If I were a single parent, I wouldn't have done it. If I worked full time, it probably would have been harder. Since I stay at home, I feel that I have time. 

I did go overboard with one thing though. When we planted our spring garden, I planted some butternut squash. I knew this was a common baby food starter, so I thought I would grow my own and save even more money. It worked. 

I picked the first butternut squash and tried using my Magic Bullet to purée it. That didn't work very well. If I had a better food processor, it might have, but instead I chose to get an actual baby food maker. After reading online reviews, I picked the Sage Spoonfuls one. It has a hand blender and optional food processor.  It also comes with a book that has excellent reviews.

Following  the instructions that came with the book, I first cut the squash in half lengthwise, scooped out the seeds, then placed it face down on a parchment covered cookie sheet. 

I baked them for about forty minutes. 

The tricky part comes next. I had to separate the skin. I tried a spoon, but found it easier just to use my fingers. 

The squash then went into the food processor for blending. 

There are a couple of ways that I freeze it, depending on time. I sometimes fill the containers that came with the machine. 

Other times I fill ice cube trays and then transfer frozen cubes to plastic bags. 

Or sometimes I throw it into a container like the ones that came with the baby food maker. 

To defrost, if its in a container, I leave one in the fridge overnight. 

For cubes, i transfer a couple into a breast milk storage bag and warm in the bottle warmer. It seems to have worked so far. 

Angela seems to love the results!

Anyone else out there make your own baby food?  What are your favorites? 

It's Babytime!

I've been working with kids for a very long time. I believe in early childhood education. However, I chose to take a year off work to stay home with my daughter once she was born.  I still

believe that it's important for Angela to be around other kids. What is a stay at home mom to do?

A couple of years ago, the San Antonio Public Library came to do a presentation at the school I where I worked. I was exited to find I could get a library card, as I lived just outside the city limits. I began going to the library regularly.  It's family entertainment on a budget. You can get books, movies, music, and other stuff, all with a tag on your keychain. 

Different events are held at at the library free of charge.  There is something for everyone, and you can find it all online at mysapl.org. For this blog, I am going to focus on Babytime. 

Babytime is a Mommy and Me class offered at some branches of the San Antonio Public Library. I first went to one at the Maverick Library Branch on Wednesdays. I walked in a few minutes late and I was handed a piece of paper with the songs for the day. Angela was still too small to do many of the finger plays, but I didn't think that was important. What is important is the interaction with other babies.  The class at the Maverick also included a story for the babies and an oppertunity to play with musical insturments and other toys.
The next week, we joined the class at the Igo library branch.  We have been going to this one pretty regularly since.  There are more songs with this class then there are stories, but I find the class interactive and fun.  I also find that the class encourages reading to babies.  Angela gets to see other babies, and I get to see other Moms.  It also gets me out of the house, which is very important.
In short, the library here in San Antonio is a great and under utilized resource for families.  I highly recommend that you use your own local library wherever it may be.  In these hot summer months, it is an air conditioned place to explore!

Parenting a Newborn, There's an App for That

Parents of babies are forgetful.  I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the sleep depravation.  When your child is crying and you can't tell which way is up, it's easy to forget a lot of things.  It's hard to remember when you last fed the baby or how much she ate.  I can't tell you how many times I've screamed at Lloyd from the other room, "When did you feed her last?"  

I have been in childcare for years, and one tool we use when we have several people caring for one child throughout the day is the daily report.  This is where you have a single sheet of paper and write down when a baby has been fed, when a diaper has been changed, and when they have napped.  This is practical when babies are fed and changed primarily in one room.  They even send you home with a similar sheet from the hospital.  I found it impractical.  I don't spend all day in one room; I have a two story house.  Can I carry a piece of paper around with me all day?  No I can't.  But there is one thing I do carry with me all day; my cell phone. 

Now I suppose I could use the notepad feature to write down every diaper change and nap, but thanks to similarly minded parents, there's an app for that, actually there are several, and I have two!  

The first one I heard about through an email from a formula company. It's called the Similac Strong Mom's Baby Journal. I loved the fact that I could keep track of how much breast milk I was pumping, but I used other features very rarely.  

I found out about another app through another email from The Honest Company. It had just started. Lloyd and I both downloaded this one and it quickly became our primary documentation tool. 

The app is linked through our account with Honest.com, so the really cool thing is we can put in an entry with one phone and it shows up on the other. We use most of the features. We can keep track of feedings, doctors visits, diaper changes, nap times, and we track her growth. We can even use this app to manage our diaper subscription. 

Now, do we write down everything? Nope. I'm a little better at it than Lloyd is because I've been doing it for years. I know at least a few parents of children I taught over the last few years are reading this, and I'm betting at least one or two remember times when I slipped up on the documentation. I'm still not perfect at it, but the app does help.

 I am aware that quite a few parents have their children in a child care situation.  In most cases, caregivers will not have the app on their phones. The app does allow you to easily change time of an entry, so if you want all of your documentation in one place, you can enter information from the given daily report to the app.  

There are more than these two apps on the market, and I'm sure they all have their pros and cons. The Honest Company's Honest Baby App is what works for us and we highly reccomend it to other new parents who can't remember if they fed the baby at two or three. 

Diapers: So Many Choices!

When it comes to diapers, moms today have more choices then ever before. We have disposable, eco friendly, cloth and hybrid. There is even a school of thought that says a baby is born potty trained and diapers are completely unnecessary. When I was pregnant, I did a lot of research as to what would be better for the environment, my baby's bottom, and our family's bottom line.
Years in early childhood education taught me a thing or two about disposable diapers. I ran across almost every type and brand. The most common types were Pampers and Huggies. When a family belonged to a werehouse club, thats where they bought their diapers. If the child wore Pampers, the family belonged to Sam's Club. Huggies or Kirklands meant they were Costco people. In short, the only difference between Huggies and Pampers is availability.
I ran across a lot of store brand diapers. I liked the Kirkland's brand from Costco and the Target brand the best. I found little difference between those two and the name brands.
I saw a few Luvs and thought they were OK. The Seventh generation diapers were the most popular environmental option, and I found that they worked about as well. And after years of working with children, I heard none of them say a word about the artwork on their diaper, unless it was to tell me I grabbed another child's diaper by mistake.
During my pre-Angela diaper research, I spent a lot of time at Babies R' Us.  I came across something called g-Diapers.  This was a hybrid diaper system with a cloth outside and a disposable liner.  There was also a cloth liner if you planned to use it as a cloth diaper system.  The problem with this system was cost.  The liners alone are more expensive than almost any disposable diaper, plus the fact that you have to pay extra for the "g-Pants" which are the cloth outsides.  I also came across another similar system called The Perfect Bum.  This system was a little cheaper, but the sets came packaged with a cloth liner, a cloth outside and a tee shirt.  Optional disposable liners are sold seprately.  I determined the hybrid system was not cost effective, but I did buy two g-Pants and three of the Perfect Bum sets.  I also bought a box of each kind of cloth liner.  I thought that I would give cloth a try.
Facebook also advertises a company started by Jessica Alba, an actress who has played, among other things, Susan Storm in the Fantastic Four movies.  The Honest Company offered a diaper subscription service.  I wasn't sure about a diaper I had never seen before, so I didn't give them much thought.
Well, as I mentioned before, Angela came a bit early.  This meant that she was small.  She was too small for the size one diapers to be effective.  Everyone who gave me diapers for baby showers gave me size one.  Even the pack the hospital sent home with me was size one.  I had one pack of newborn diapers that I would now have to use, but I knew those would be gone soon.  For a couple of weeks, I sent Lloyd after work to buy large boxes of diapers, usually Huggies.  Costco didn't sell the size we needed.
I revisited The Honest Company, this time showing Lloyd the site.  This time, we took a calculator to compare costs.  It worked out to be around the same cost per diaper as Huggies or Pampers, with a few exceptions.  FIrst, this cost included wipes, I knew we would probably need more wipes then this, but it was a good enough amount to make it worth it.  Another bonus was that these would be delivered to our door.  This was nice because when I sent Lloyd for diapers on our way home, inevitably, it would be a list of other things I didn't really need.
We decided to try.  We got the sample pack of seven diapers of various designs to try.

I fell in love with them, so we started the subscription service.  The designs are really cute, and the diapers work very well.  I have found them much less like plastic than other diapers, and they are better for the environment.  They seem to work well for us, at least for now.  If anyone who reads this wants to try them, please let me know so we can refer you and get a bonus!



Now that she's grown into them, I've used the cloth diapers sometimes when we're home alone.  I have found them pretty easy.  I have to say that I prefer gDiapers to Perfect Bum.  They are more like cloth on the outside and the liners are smaller.  Neither diaper fits well under anything with snaps, so I can only use them with the little tee shirts.  I also have to share that I would not dream of using cloth diapers if my baby was on anything but breast milk.  Poop when a child is on an exclusive diet of breast milk stinks less and is easier to deal with.

The advantage to cloth is that it gets the baby's skin to breathe easier.  This makes it easier to prevent diaper rash.
There is no right way to diaper your baby.  I can tell you that for us, I like the Honest Company and they seem to be better for my baby's bottom and her tiny little carbon footprint.

The Stash.

I am now taking back my last blog entry.  I no longer love the Tommee Tippee breast pump.  I still love the system, the pods are great the pump was comfortable, but the motor began to die.  As my breast milk stash dwindled down, I felt less like a good mommy because I couldn’t make it even two months before I dried up.  Then I realized, it wasn’t me, it was the pump.  

Online reviews showed a lot of women had the same problem.  It was around ten o’clock when I realized this.   I still had the manual pump that the hospital gave me so I started to pump in bed next to Lloyd.  It flowed like crazy.  Lloyd, still on his iPad, found reviews for another one that were sold at Wal-Mart for a good price.  He then put on his pants, and went to Wal-Mart to buy it, even though I told him he didn’t have to.  He got the last one they had.  It’s the First Years MiPump, this time it’s a double pump.  It’s no where near as comfortable, I lose a lot more milk in transfer and droplets that get stuck, but it takes me half the time to pump and my stash built back up in no time.  

Because Angela rarely nurses directly, I pump all the time, and the stash has become an obsession of mine.  I have six four ounce pods that I keep in rotation in the fridge.  It took me a while to fill all six of those, but I finally did, I then froze two pods worth in a breast milk storage bag and tried to keep filling.  This was right when the pump went out, so I wound out thawing out the the bag and putting the milk back in the rotation. It took almost a week to build my stash to what it was before the pump gave out, in fact I just put some back in the freezer this morning.  I drink as much water as I possibly can, I also drink Mother’s Milk tea, and I take an herb that helps with lactation.  I’m not sure if it helps at all, but something does.  

The stash is up, but I want it higher!  A friend told me that she had a deep freezer full of breast milk, and fed her twins for six months after she stopped pumping!  I would love that.  I am trying to avoid spending money on formula if I can possibly help it.  Plus every time we give her formula, she seems to get some tummy trouble.  I don’t want to have to do it much.  

I suggest all pregnant women get on the mailing lists for all of the formula companies.  I have formula stashed in the cabinet that the companies sent me for free, and I still haven’t made it through the first cans of it!  I’m hoping that I can donate what is left to the food bank, but we’ll see what happens when she can switch to whole milk.  

Ode to my Breast Pump

A few months before I gave birth, a friend told me something that stuck with me.  She said, “You have to remember that the point is to get breast milk into her body, not that formula is poison.  And it doesn’t matter if it comes from your breast or a bottle.”

I had read a few points of view that said that formula was poison.  Much like the epidural, my objection to formula was never because I was a purist.  It’s simple, formula is expensive, breast milk is free.  

After I had Angela, I could not get her to nurse.  She was three weeks early and I hadn’t had time to get a breast pump yet, but the hospital had one that I could use while I was there.  They also gave me a bag of accessories to go with it.  I knew I didn’t plan on buying the compatible breast pump, so most of them were useless to me, but it did come with a hand pump, which would help to keep me stimulated over the next couple of days until I could get the electric one.  I sent Lloyd out with a list of things to get from Target, including Tommee Tippee Single Electric Breast Pump.  

Tommee TIppee is a brand that, if the box is to be believed, has been popular in the UK for years.  I had heard of the bottles before.  They’re slightly smaller, and have a wider mouth.  I worked with a little boy who would not take a bottle because he was so used to his mom’s breast.  Even he took this bottle because it was shaped more like a breast.  I put these bottles and the breast pump on my registry.  I got the bottles, not the breast pump, that we bought with a bunch of gift cards.  

The entire system is wonderful.  Let me start by saying that the breast pump I used at the hospital had a hard plastic cone to attach to my nipple and it hurt!  The one I bought had a soft silicone cup that squeezed the nipple.  I found this much more comfortable.  It took weeks before I felt the need for nipple cream.

With the Tommee Tippee system, the pump attaches directly into the bottle.  There are also inserts that fit inside the bottle before you attach to the pump that can be pumped into directly and then refrigerate.  When you are ready to use the milk inside the insert, you simply fill the bottle with tap water as hot as you can get it, put the insert back in, and then attach a nipple.  The inserts that come with the pump are 2 oz inserts, 4oz are also available, which I have also purchased.  I also have a bottle warmer for occasions where I don’t use the inserts at all.  I didn’t think that I would use it, but as it turns out, I do.  

The only thing I regret about the breast pump is that I didn’t get the double.  I go back and forth on this.  I think it would be awkward to hold both cups at once, but it would take me half the time to pump.  Either way, I already purchased the single.  Maybe with my next child I will get the double.  I can tell you that if I do have another baby, I’m taking this pump with me to the hospital.  

There are purest, and quite a few of them, who say that I shouldn’t give up on nursing her directly and I haven’t completely given up, but pumping seems to work for me, especially with this particular system.  I am not being paid any money from this company, (I wish I was that big), but I will say I absolutely love it!  And if anyone from the Tommee Tippee company is reading this, please, send me free stuff!

Childbirth

I am scared to death of needles.  I always have been.  I don’t know where it comes from, but I can remember kicking and screaming while nurses at the pediatricians office tried giving me a shot in the rump.  I once took my dad with me to get dental work done, and I was twenty three!  I had a root canal and had to be put on anti anxiety medication.  When I had surgery last year, I had to be held down by three different nurses to get an IV started.  I stuck with my OBGYN not because of him, but because of of the lady who drew my blood, she was awesome.  

So the prospect of a giant needle going into my spine was not exactly appealing.  This was the main reason I wanted to avoid it.  I did not think that an epidural would be bad for my my daughter, but I just didn’t want one.

All through my pregnancy, people gave me advice.  When I said that I wanted a natural, drug free birth, several people told me I was crazy.  I had someone telling me, “Tell the doctor you want a scheduled c-section, it’s worth it.”  I had someone else telling me “Have them shoot you up as soon as possible.”  But everyone who had a natural childbirth said. “It’s so worth it.”  It always looked like people had more trouble recovering from the epidural than from the birth itself.  It seemed like an added bonus.   

So we signed up for a class.  We thought of the Bradley Method, but by the time we signed up, it was too late.  We found an online Lamaze class that had supplemental classes we could take in person locally.  I thought the class was perfect for us because of all of the traveling we would be doing around the holidays.  I learned quite a bit.  We didn’t take the local classes.  I thought I was prepared; I had a birth plan.  

The Plan

I knew that I wanted a drug free labor, but that was not always possible.  My mother and my sister both went so long that they had to be induced, so I knew that this was a possibility for me as well.  I knew from the classes that the drug used to induce or speed up labor makes your contractions harder.   I knew I would have to suck it up for an epidural at that point.  

If I was at home, I would take a bath and try to relax from the contractions, If I was at work, I would walk around to try and speed up labor.  Either way I would call my husband for him to take me into the hospital when the contractions reached ten minutes apart.  With all the walking I did on a daily basis as a preschool teacher, I expected a fast and easy labor.  

What Actually Happened

I went to my regular appointment with my doctor.  My  blood pressure had spiked pretty high.  I was diagnosed with gestational hypertension and told to get to the hospital.  I not only had to be induced, I needed to put on a magnesium drip.  I had to have two IV’s, one in each arm, plus a blood pressure cuff, and a catheter to catch my urine.  That’s right, I couldn’t get up and go to the bathroom for over two days.  Now in order to have a drug free birth it is necessary to move around.  You should be walking, squatting, or at the very least moving up and down in the bed.  It was impossible for me to get into any kind of position while hooked up to all of that extra stuff!  because of all this, I gave in and had the epidural.  

It came time to push after a full twenty four hours of being in labor.  At that point, the baby still hadn’t moved down, neither had my cervix,  when the doctor checked to see if I was dilated, it hurt quite a bit.  All of the things I knew from the classes to do that would get the baby in a better position, I couldn’t do!  I silently hoped for them to just slice me open and get the kid out of me!

At around 5:00 I got my wish.  They upped the drugs going through the epidural tube, and I was feeling good.  I took off my contacts, put on my glasses and prepared to be cut open like a watermelon.  They wheeled me into the operating room and at 5:20 PM, Angela Luisa Pilkey was pulled out of my body.  They wrapped her up and put her in front of my face.  She was adorable, and very tiny.  I gave her a little kiss on the nose.  It was all I could do.  I couldn’t hold her, either because of the c-section, or the magnesium.  

I was taken off the magnesium and wheeled back to labor and delivery, not to a regular room.  My baby was also taken from me and not brought back.  I didn’t see her until after 9:00.  All of the websites say this is a bad thing; mommies need to bond with their babies and not be separated from them for very long at all.  I didn’t spend that night with my baby.  

The next morning we both went to our own room.  From then on, I had a pretty good experience.  All of the magnesium was out of my system and my baby and I were doing great, with one exception,  I couldn’t nurse!  There were lactation consultants who were somewhat helpful, but they were only available during the day.  Anyone who has had a baby knows that it is a 24 hour per day process at first.  Babies need to be fed around the clock.  

I could barely feed her, and because she was so tiny, I was talked into supplementing her with formula, which I also didn’t want to do.  She got so used to eating from the bottle, she didn’t want to nurse directly, and it kind of hurt me.  I wanted what was best for her, and that included breast feeding.  Nothing was going according to plan.

Forty eight hours after my c-section, Angela and I were released from the hospital.  Her going home outfit didn’t fit, but luckily I had something else that worked.  

The next couple of days were kind of a blur.  I know I was on pain killers, my parents were around, and I couldn’t stand up straight.  The point is, even though nothing went according to plan, I have a wonderful, beautiful, healthy baby girl.  

I started this blog with the plan to write down all of my experiences to share them with everyone else.  I want people, including me to understand that not being a perfect parent doesn’t make you a bad parent.  I’m not an expert, I’m just a mom, and I want to share what works for me.  I would love others to leave comments and hear what works for them.