The joy of cooking... for baby

Ah the food issue. Mommies have all had it: my kid won't eat this, my kid will only eat that, my kid ate this religiously and now won't touch it.... I can safely say that, in short, food is a struggle for all of us at one point or another.

When MLO started on solid food there was little he didn't like. Those few things were easily avoidable and nutritional equivalents were readily available and appreciated by him. Somewhere around 12 months he started to get weird on me. He would turn his nose up at our tried and true routine of scrambled eggs with cheese, broccoli, and  a touch of garlic powder for breakfast. WTF pal? All of a sudden I had to get creative. How do I pack the same amount of nutritional bang into an MLO sized meal? I started to branch out: french toast made with maple syrup instead of sugar, no syrup on the toast with a banana or oatmeal with honey and whole milk and a serving of veggies and hummus at lunch or dinner. I cut scrambled eggs out all together and started to offer more meats and cheeses. I discovered he loved goat cheese and that aside from 'outside' the only other discernible word he uttered was 'hummus'.

As I was struggling with the need to explore food choices for MLO I kept asking myself, "What changed?" One day it dawned on me, the kid was bored. Can you imagine eating the same things at the same time of day for 3 or more months straight? In hind-site, I would have been concerned if he hadn't started to turn his nose up at our "tried and true" routine. As time went on, I started to mix things up as a matter of course. I tried hard to move those staples around so they didn't happen in the same way at the same time. I began to bake bread and muffins that I knew could pack a punch for the whole grains they contained. As our trip to Montana grew closer I began to fret over how I would meet his needs over 8 days and 7 nights of road trip and camping. The cooler and the fridge in our tiny trailer weren't long term storage situations that I trusted, and I knew that at least one meal of the day would happen in the car. Fortunately, I stumbled on Go Go Applesauce, an individually wrapped packet of organic applesauce. I packed string cheese and a plethora of crackers, my favorite for MLO being the Trader Joe's Multigrain crackers for their relatively low sodium, delicious flavor, practically choke-safe texture and Peanut-free-ness. What I didn't plan for was the emotional and temporal need for fast food; on that trip MLO was introduced to his first McDonald's hamburger and fries, and Jack in the Box breakfast bowl, and I don't feel a bit guilty about it. MLO ate Daddy's grilled burgers for dinner and enjoyed many a breakfast of cheerios and banana as we rolled out of the campsite. 

Since arriving in our destination MLO has discovered fresh trout (shish- for fish), raw spinach slathered in ranch dressing, raw green beans and plain raisins. He loves wheat toast with butter at breakfast and snacks of yogurt with cinnamon, cheerios and applesauce. Oatmeal with whole milk, a touch of honey and raisins or fresh fruit is a welcome way to beat the morning chill. Much to my shame, he has a derth of experience when it comes to feeding himself with utensils. He has such a propensity for making a mess that I shy away from giving him the spoon when he has yogurt and I never thought to hand over the fork except with food already on it. I have resolved to overcome my fear of mess and give him cheerios in a bowl with a spoon (I'm starting slow... don't judge me!) and green beans on his high chair tray with a fork at his disposal. The dogs are going to love it.

Oh, What?

We're back! Well, actually, we are very very far away. But with all the new adventures afoot I knew I needed to update the site, so here we go:

MLO turned 18 months old on September 2nd. In the last few weeks he has begun to say 'no' and nod his head 'yes' in response to questions. He has started to string words together such as, "River... cold water... fish!" You may wonder where he got those particular words, seeing as we live on the central coast of California. It just so happens that Hubby has the type of job that lets him shove off and work from a home office for, say, three months every seven years. That being the case, we moved to Montana at the end of July. That's right, Montana. Big sky country, lakes, rivers, streams, mountains, grizzly bears, cougars, wolves, black bears, beavers in our pond, bats in the washing machine and moose in the road. Us being us, we did it in style. We are living fifteen minutes out a dirt road off of the only paved road in this particular valley. We are about an hour and a half from a hospital, and half an hour from the nearest physician. Most days we are literally miles from any other human and the eighty year old rough hewn log cabin we are living in has been broken into by bears twice in its lifetime. Roughin it? You bet your ass!

So MLO has a whole new vocabulary to match his new world: "Boom! Thunder" (that applies to thunder and gunfire....), "Doe! Buck!", "Dada rod" (don't be gross, daddy fly fishes!), "Lake, river, creek" and "Pond" all have "Cold water" and "Fish" and we explore them on the "Boat" together. "Rock, stick, pine cone" and "Log" are his new favorite toys which he throws with relish into his new Tonka dump truck or in the case of the log, balances on and practices his jumping. The Tonka is a mild manifestation of MLO's newest and most potent love. MLO can now identify excavators, skid steers, loaders, dump trucks, bull dozers and backhoes... he's obsessed. To fuel this love of big machinery we watch the "Twenty Trucks" videos on You Tube. CHECK IT OUT.

We all love them, but for such different reasons. I have never heard a man sing so passionately about excavators. It brings tears (from fits of laughter) to my eyes. MLO sits transfixed on my lap, absorbing every word. I think those videos have taught him more about trucks than the myriad truck board books he reads every day.  

Speaking of videos, MLO has also started to watch the "Baby's First Word Stories" video series by So Smart. I relented on the whole TV thing when I realized that he had the patience to sit and watch a few minutes at a time. When you think about it, TV is an incredibly potent teaching tool. It combines images with corresponding sounds and allows for repetition so that the kiddo can start to integrate words with objects in context. He has really picked up on the vocabulary introduced in the videos. I do limit his TV time to 30 minutes a day, as I don't want TV to overshadow play. He has gone from watching 5 minutes at a time to demanding more when I turn it off after 30. The videos have engaging but gentle music, cute relate-able characters and simple story lines. Each episode finishes with a review of the words learned. We have the "Pets", "Get Dressed", "House" and "We Go" DVDs and there are several stories on each. MLO loves them all, and now asks for Edward, Dee Dee, Larry and Iggy when he gets up in the morning.

MLO is now awake and demanding that we go outside, so I will leave you with those wild images and movie recommendations with more descriptions of outdoor toddler living to follow.

Cheers from MT!

A view from our yard

 

Baby Love

First of all, I have to say "thank you" to Dakota for inviting me to post on her blog. It's been great fun getting insight from her on daily baby life, whether through talk or reading her blog. It truly helps to confer when you become a parent, especially to help keep your sanity - with not just your husband, but family and friends, too.


My baby, J, is 6 months old now, and since his birth I have just been in utter baby love. I never knew such a love. He was a surprise in every way - unplanned pregnancy and we didn't know that we were having a boy either. I like surprises as my hubs would say. My pregnancy was bliss, but my labor not so much. It was long, but I got through most of it without pain medication, which is what I wanted. After about 17 hours of hard labor with no change and just an hour and a half of sleep in 34 hours, we decided that I would get an epidural. Once I received the light epidural, my hubs and I got 2 hours of what felt like really deep sleep! Even better, once I woke up I was ready to go!! Then came our reason for living. We brought J home a day later and I just wanted to kiss him all over. Seriously, I wanted to kiss him non-stop. Perhaps, the overwhelming amount of hormones rising and falling in my body pursued me to want to make out with my son? This never-ending experience has made me feel so fortunate and I will continue to each and every day for our sweet boy.


J has been a pretty happy and mellow baby for us - easy to nurse and smiling early on - but when it comes to sleep he let us know early on what he wanted and that was to be walked and held to sleep. At about 3 months he soothed himself to sleep a few times in his crib, and had also been sleeping up to 9 hours at night, which was fabulous of course. Then that bubble burst and he was waking up 2-4 times a night screaming out of hunger. It wasn't until his 4 month well visit that we found out he grew 3 inches in length in 7 weeks. That was a vaild enough reason for me!


As parents, my hubs and I knew that we wanted to keep doing the things that we loved pre-baby, so we did and are continuing to do so. When J was 3 months old we started to do some small travels, like overnights not too many hours a way. We even took him to his first concert when he was just under 4 months, which was fortunately an accoustic show, and he wore sound-out headphones. He was amazing throughout and just slept as I carried and swayed him in the Ergo - all amidst windy and rainy whether. He was such a sport for his mom and dad. And right after that we did our first camping trip as a family - pretty much where it all began as it was the place where hubs and I got engaged. It was extra special because the campground had just reopened after a big fire 2 years prior.


The second bubble burst a little while after his first big growth spurt. He was indulging in longer night sleeps, until the week of Thanksgiving. I drove J, my dog, and I (poor hubs had to work) to Southern CA to my parents for the night before driving to Arizona to see J's great grandmother for the week. Driving what normally is 3 1/2 hours ended up being 7 hours for nursing stops and J was just plain lonely in the back seat when our dog wasn't standing up to look at him. That night was the first of many more disrupted sleeps, and driving to Arizona the next day was an even longer haul. So, for the past 2 months J has been waking up several times a night to nurse and be held. I thought it was all from travel and that this was the forefront to getting stuck in a rut that could possibly last 10 years (believe me, I am kidding!), but at his last well visit he did have another growth spurt - his head! Yaaa, for his growing brain! I am not worried about his constant night waking, though, and just keep telling myself that I will one day get a full night's sleep. So what if I am half awake when we are having productive bonding and nurturing time! I will miss it someday because they really do grow fast. And I now understand why my dad always told me, "Don't grow up. Stay how you are now," when I was little. I truly want J to stay a baby and in my arms forever. Then again, I miss having more than a glass of wine, and getting up and go for selfish reasons. So perhaps he can stay a baby 6 days a week and then give me one day to not have any responsibilities. If only we could pick and choose in our lives. But he is forever my little boy and I don't want to miss one second of him either.

Tent Camping with Your Baby

So Hubby and I are big time into camping, off-roading, and general outdoors-type entertainment. When I was pregnant with MLO, Hubby and I decided that we wanted to continue to do those things we loved with our little one. As the summer months grew near, I started lightly researching camping tips for parents of kids under 1 year of age. I didn't find a whole lot. We took MLO on his first camping trip when he was just over 3 months old. Before I forget all the stuff we learned this summer I figured I better make this post.

General Ideas:
1. Take a deep breath and accept that you are going into uncharted territory.
Each child is different. For instance, MLO always had a hard time going to sleep if he could see what was going on. He had to be in the tent, in the car, in the carrier (Ergo baby or Baby Bjorn) or in a covered, small travel bassinet in order to fall asleep. There was no sleeping in arms or sleeping in his chair and falling asleep in the carrier was not a guarantee or an easy thing to do. We just had to accept that we couldn't control when and where he was going to nap. If you want to enjoy it, let go of your expectations!

2. Be willing to change plans if necessary to retain the sanity of the family.
On the last day of camping during our first trip we were on the Rubicon Trail. We heard thunder and noted some nasty clouds a-gathering. We decided we didn't want to break camp in the rain the next morning so we packed up that afternoon and headed down the mountain on our7 hour drive home. We got home around midnight, and though it was a long, hard day for all of us, at least we weren't wet....

3. Make a list!
Hubby and I decided to make lists for 3 general areas of packing: kitchen, general camp, and baby. We packed the contents of each list into bins (or coolers where appropriate). This helped keep everything clear in our minds and organized in camp.

4. Pack extra for your first trip.
I wasn't sure how many burp cloths, diapers, wipes, changes of clothes or toys to bring. I looked at our consumption during a day at home and added about 20%. That came in handy when MLO went through more sweatshirts and long sleeved onsies than I expected.

Hubby and I had an amazing time camping with our little fella this summer. We have one of a kind pictures and memories we will hold forever. As we camped more and as MLO grew, we realized we could cut back on some things. For instance, generally it wasn't warm enough for MLO to be in just shorts and a short sleeved onsie so I didn't bring shorts and I brought fewer onsies. Here are some provisions we found particularly useful:

Provisions
1. Unscented diapers and fragrance free wipes: Huggies and Seventh Generation, among others, make unscented diapers and wipes. This is a must for inside the tent! Regardless of whether or not bears are interested in fragranced diapers, I slept better knowing we weren't tempting fate.

2. At least one sleeping bag that isn't a mummy bag. We realized that nighttime was generally too cold for even a jammied, swaddled, beanied, and bagged baby on his own. While we had a pack n' play for naps (which was very handy), MLO slept in a sleeping bag with one of us at night. The mummy bags were too constrictive for 2 of us and I worried that he was going to asphyxiate.

3. A full sized futon mattress. We purchased a basic one of these for camping a few years ago and love it. We tried sleeping on cots with the baby and it was just too awkward. It also fits great in our 4 person tent.

4. Some sort of chair for baby. When MLO was only a few months old we used a rocker that was gifted to us. That thing came in SO handy. It vibrated and soothed and was a safe place we could set him down when we were working in the campsite or eating meals. Once he started sitting up on his own we used a hook on chair that we attached to the picnic table. For that span of time where he was growing out of the rocker but not yet sitting on his own I wish we had the bebePOD. I recently acquired it and LOVE it for around the house and on the go. It would have been great to have in the camp site.

5. Sweatshirts, long sleeved onsies, beanies, footie pajamas and shoes. Camping is cold! We layered our little guy in footie pjs with a pair of pants and a sweatshirt in the morning. We even put shoes on his little feet to keep the heat in.

6. Sunscreen and hats. If your little one is going to be in the sun for more than 15 minutes sunscreen is a must. We had the little mister in hats when he was outdoors too.

From all accounts, camping with a pre-crawler is easy. Don't be scared! If camping is something you loved before your little person joined the world then make it happen and enjoy the ride. I can tell you from experience that you'll be glad you did!

MLO and me overlooking Edison Lake July, 2010. MLO was 4.5 months old.