Feeding My Family

I love food.  I love cooking it, eating it and sharing it.  I also love good health.  I like to feel my body working at it’s best, feeling, strong and clean.  Sometimes I find these two loves at odds with each other.  Reconciling them is something I’m constantly working on.  In this post I will share my experience with making my own baby food and feeding all three of my kids.  My oldest is 6 and my twins are 14 months old. 

First I want to share my family’s eating philosophy.  I have read a bit about the links between health and diet and as a result my family has chosen to eat a certain way.  We are what many describe as flexitarians.  We believe there is an ideal way to eat for the greatest health and we aim for that ideal but we take plenty of detours from it.  We believe the ideal diet is vegan, organic, non-processed, mostly fruits and veggies, low in sugar or other sweeteners and grown by and purchased from local producers.  Truly ideal would be producing it all ourselves.  Like I said, we take a lot of detours from this ideal – it’s just something we shoot for and we hope to get better at it every year.  The closer we get to it the better we feel and the fewer health problems we experience.  I did try for 6 weeks; to live according to the Eat to Live rules and I did it perfectly.  It was amazing.  I wrote about it in an earlier post.  Our weaknesses are dairy products, sweets, summer BBQs, holidays, bread and pasta. 

We have based this philosophy on a handful of books that I’ve read and discussed with my husband.  He’s read some of them.  They include, Eat to Live, Disease Proof Your Child, How to Get Your Kid To Eat But Not Too Much, In Defense of Food, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, and most important to us, The Word Of Wisdom from The Doctrine and Covenants.

My favorite healthy recipes come from the following cookbooks:  First Meals, Whole Food, In Season, Cooking Light: Salads, and Mediterranean Kitchen.  These include non-vegan recipes but I tend to skip those and focus on the plant-based recipes. 

I totally reject the notion of “kid food” – things like fruit snacks, fishy crackers, lunchables, juice boxes, and other processed, snack food marketed to kids.  It’s a modern invention associated with the SAD (Standard American Diet) way of eating that is linked with very high rates of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.   I believe starting toddlers out on “kid food” just primes them for fast food and junk food and deprives them of the opportunity to develop a taste for healthy food. 

Here’s how I feed my kids. 

Birth – 6 months

Idealy, breastmilk only.  I adopted all 3 of my kids and did manage to breast feed them but had to supplement with formula.  Happy to share more with anyone looking into breastfeeding an adopted baby.

6 months – 12 months

I started all 3 of my kids on pureed vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, peas, carrots, potatoes, yams, winter squash, and sweet potatoes.  I want them to develop a taste for vegetables, especially the ones that aren’t sweet, before I introduced fruits.  My 6 year old still loves broccoli better than just about anything.  Of course they still get most of their calories from breast milk or formula.  With my twins, our dietician and doctor encouraged me to start with baby cereal but I found they had a hard time digesting it so I stopped it and just fed them pureed veggies.  After about a month of veggies I start introducing pureed fruits like bananas, apples, mango, and pears.  I also start mixing things together and making the texture chunkier.  Once they can handle chunky textures and pick things up with their fingers I give them soft, cooked veggies and fruits.  When I’m low on cooked veggies and fruits and short on time I used canned – not ideal, but better than a lot of other options!  I also give them raw banana and avocado chunks, frozen peas (awesome on sore, teething gums!) and canned black beans (smaller than most beans).  They started consuming less milk about this time.  After my twins were doing well with all the finger food and their systems were digesting all the veggies, fruits, and beans well I started offering them bits of whole wheat bread (sometimes I make my own) and making grain-based casseroles for them.  They wouldn’t mind eating these with their fingers but I can’t handle the mess!  I make a sweet casserole and a savory casserole.  My 14 month-old daughter prefers the savory while her twin brother prefers the sweet.  I suspect this reflects their unique dietary needs.  One casserole will usually last for the whole week.

Sweet Casserole

Combine in a casserole dish:

1 to 2 cups of cooked steel cut oats

Homemade applesauce (peeled apples, cinnamon, and water)

Any soft, raw, soft-cooked, or canned fruit that you have on hand like peaches, pears, cranberries, grapes, apples, bananas (add them fresh right before serving), mango, blue berries, and apricots.  Make sure it’s all baby-bite-sized.

¼ tsp of cinnamon

Savory Casserole

Combine in a casserole dish:

1 to 2 cups of cooked brown rice

Any soft, raw, soft-cooked or canned vegetables you have on hand like, onion, carrots, celery, peas, mushrooms, green beans, broccoli, potatoes, yams, winter squash, sweet potatoes, Brussels sprouts, avocado, and beets. Make sure it’s all baby-bite-sized.

1 can of beans.  (Black are nice and small, others probably need to be cut in half)

1 can of cream of mushroom soup (I feel guilty about this but my daughter is a little picky and she will eat any veggie coated in cream of mushroom so I think it’s an okay trade off.  I should learn to make my own soymilk version….)

I don’t bake them but you could.  I just mix them, refrigerate them and warm up a small bowl for each feeding and my twins gobble them up.  I try to make sure that at least half of the volume comes from fruit or veggies. 

When we are out of the house for mealtime, I take small containers of beans, peas, canned veggies, and a couple slices of bread with me.  Easy, cheap, and healthy.

12 – 24 months 

I start letting them sample what the rest of us are eating at the table, as long as it’s not dangerous for them.  We wait until 2 yrs old on peanut butter, nuts, honey, strawberries, green salad (need teeth for that!), and citrus. We also don’t share cookies or other treats with them. I have not and don’t plan to introduce regular cows milk or juice to my twins.  I still give them formula 3- 4 times a day.  I will eventually start offering them soy and nut milks in small quantities.  This really helps my husband and I focus on healthier eating – we don’t want to set a bad example for our kids.  For breakfast this includes oatmeal (steel cut is best but instant is so much easier), fruit, green smoothies (pureed fruit and spinach) toast, and pancakes.  For lunch we typically have PB sandwiches, fresh and dried fruit, salad, nuts, and veggies and dip.  Our dinner staples are pasta (whole wheat or multi-grain) w/marinara and parmesan, soft polenta made with parmesan and butter, massive green salad with beans and sometimes grilled chicken, steamed veggies, veggie soup and homemade biscuits (nothing healthy about these), rice and beans, and grain-based salads. 

2 years old (or whenever they have a full set of teeth) and on

They eat what we eat.  If they don’t like what we’re having for a given meal, they might be hungry but I won’t make them anything else.  Our 6 year old has done very well with this.  She goes through picky stages and sometimes she’s not satisfied at the end of a meal but she usually makes up for it later in the day or the next day.   I just keep offering her a wide variety of healthy food and she sometimes discovers that now she likes something she used to hate.  I don’t force my kids to eat anything; I just don’t offer them much that’s not healthy.  When my oldest goes to parties or other places away from home she is very attracted to junk food and will eat as much as she can but I don’t worry about this because we’re pretty healthy at home.  She seems to be losing her taste for dairy.  We only have Parmesan and butter on a regular basis.  On Sundays I make one of our less-healthy favorites like lasagna, fettuccine alfredo, chicken and cheese enchiladas, and homemade pizza.  My daughter recently declared that she doesn’t like melted cheese.  She will not eat pizza with cheese (I make a small part of it with just sauce and pepperoni for her), or any cheese-based sauce.  At friends houses she has refused milk and string cheese – she used to love both of those things.  I’m curious how my twins will do going forward.  My little girl is definitely picky.  I know more than I did when my oldest was a baby and I’m feeding my twins even healthier.    

And for all of us it’s a work in progress.  We get better every year but we’re still a long ways off from the ideal.

UPDATE:  I forgot to add that we get most of our produce from Klesick Family Farm.  Each week they deliver a box of fresh, organic, mostly locally-grown, delicious fruits and veggies.  We always order lettuce, potatoes, apples, carrots, and broccoli.  I order additional things each week based on what's in season.  We love it.  Everything is so much tastier than what you get at the grocery store and because it's so fresh it lasts longer without spoiling.  I can keep the lettuce in my fridge for more than a week.  If you live in the Seattle area, check out Klesick.  If you live somewhere else google CSA in your town.  CSAs are community supported farms and they are a growing trend.