Baby food

This is just a random "how we're doing it" post.  I don't know if we're doing it right, or if I have any great wisdom to impart, but I think everyone is curious as to how other moms are doing things, so here's what we're doing to keep our girls fed.

At our 4 month ped appointment, we were given the go ahead to start solids.  We held off until about 5 months, partly because of the whole adjusted age thing, partly because I didn't know quite how to go about it, and partly because I was not looking forward to the baby poo that would result.  We started with the basics, mixing in some oatmeal or rice with breastmilk while they learned how to eat from a spoon.  We eventually started adding peas, sweet potato, applesauce, that kind of thing.  We bought standard jars of baby food, looking for the best prices we could find.  My primary concern at this stage was ensuring that the food was pureed to the proper texture and didn't really trust myself to do that on my own.

At our 6 month ped appointment, we were told we could get more adventurous, increase feedings to 2-3 times per day, introduce meats and such.  So that's what we did.  We tried the pureed meats, still keeping with the single ingredient foods, and they did not like that one bit.  Who can blame them?  Those things smell like cat food and have an icky texture.

We've purchased a Magic Bullet and are starting to make our own purees.  Those jars of baby food are flippin expensive!  I do recommend the bullet, it's so much easier than a standard blender.  And being much smaller, we're more apt to actually use it.  We're doing pretty good at pureeing our own fruits and vegetables, but we haven't quite figured out meats yet.  We'll likely start trying that later this week.

So far, broccoli is the biggest home made hit.  Cauliflower was also well received.  The last time we roasted a chicken, K took the carcass and made a good chicken stock so we've got ice cubes of stock in our freezer.  In order to slowly introduce meaty flavors, I've been melting those cubes and using them as the liquid when I puree vegetables.  When I made up the cauliflower, I took one of the baby food packages of a turkey vegetable blend and mixed that with some of the cauliflower.  Kind of a cheap way to extend the purchased puree.  When I make baby food, I fill up one or two leftover baby food jars and then freeze the rest in ice cube trays.  Once frozen, I transfer the cubes to a plastic bag, label it with what the cubes are and the date they were made.

Other sources of "baby food" - I looked in the baking aisle of the grocery store to find purees of sweet potato and pumpkin.  Double check that they are single ingredient cans.  It's much cheaper to buy a can of that puree than to buy a small jar of the same stuff in the baby food aisle.  I also look at the canned fruits and veggies aisle.  With fruits, it's hard to find something that doesn't have sugar added, but it's there if you look.  We recently did a Costco run and picked up cases of canned corn, pears, peaches, and peas.  We also source the frozen food aisle for bags of frozen veggies.  As much as I'd love to go with fresh, fresh tends to go bad before we get a chance to prepare it or eat it so we don't keep much of it in the house.

Ok, actually feeding the girls.  They start their day with just breastmilk, 6oz each.  After their naps (still at 3 a day), they have a bottle and then solid foods.  The bottles for the rest of the day are 3.5oz.  Any more than that and they leave it to rot in the bottle, and I'm doing my best to get as much milk into them as I can.  Sometimes they get an extra 2oz bottle at bedtime if bedtime rolls around more than an hour since they've last eaten.

My food choices for them are the same as they would be for me.  The morning is oatmeal with a fruit of some sort.  Fresh bananas grind up really well in the manual food mashers we have.  I use a jars worth of fruit and mix it with 2-3 oz of oatmeal.  We've purchased applesauce in bulk.  The girls just eat from a communal bowl and share a spoon.  Yeah, not exactly the most sanitary, but whatever.  I just alternate who gets bites until either the food is gone, or they start giving me dentist face and refuse to eat any more.  Usually they start slowing down and getting distracted when we're down to the last couple of bites.

Then I get more savory as the day goes on.  It's generally a sweet type of vegetable in the afternoon like peas, corn, carrots, or sweet potato.  If I'm using a jarred food, I'll extend it with some rice so I'm only using one jar between the two girls.  I really prefer not to have them go halfway through a jar because then I have to decide if I'm going to stick the rest back in the fridge after it's been contaminated by the spoon, or throw it out.  Usually I decide to stick it in the freezer to give those little bacterias the least amount of time to grow while still saving the food for the next day.

In the evening, I'll give them the most experimental food of the day.  Vegetable beef baby food, chicken noodle, generally some sort of dinneresque concoction, usually purchased though we might start trying to blend our own.  They really like the chicken noodle from Gerber.  Again, I'll just use one jar of that and extend it with a vegetable or some rice.  Cauliflower mixes really well with those savory foods or sometimes they'll have a side of vegetable instead of mixing it in.

She wears her broccoli well

I'm starting to prepare to wean off the pump but we only have a months worth of milk in the freezer.  I'm concerned that if I stop, we'll run out before we can convert them over to cows milk, or if they have some sort of aversion to it, we'll be stuck.  So we're testing formula at the moment.  We cracked open a sample can of formula and at one of the afternoon feedings, we're giving that to them.  We've found that they'll resist if the bottle is pure formula, but if it's half formula, half breastmilk, they'll take it with no problem.  We'll just keep doing that until this can runs out as it allows us to freeze a few more bags of milk in preparation for weaning.  So now we know, when we get to the last 2 weeks worth of breastmilk, if we aren't on cows milk yet, we'll be able to mix in formula and gradually convert them over to it.  It makes me feel a lot better knowing that we won't get stuck with no options should we run out.

So that's how we're doing it.  I'm open to other ideas on how to introduce them to new foods on a budget.

My babies don't cry

I have to tell you a secret!

For the most part, the girls never cry.

The only crying they do is sometimes they don't want to go to sleep at night and Charlotte will let the tears flow and she will actually cry.  When she's upset about the sleeping situation, her screetch is pretty horrible.  Tina might do a little spurt, but it's kind of pathetic and obviously fake.

They will express a frustration with a bit of a scrunched face whine, or a squeaky grunt of some sort, but they don't get far enough to actually let out any tears.  As a result, I'm building absolutely zero tolerance for it and really have no skills for dealing with it.

When I manage to make it to the weekly family breakfast (doesn't happen very often), Tina will be all big grins at whoever comes near her while she's still in her stroller, but then someone takes her out and this look goes across her face.  Her mouth turns down.  And she starts to cry.  She's such a tease, drawing everyone in with her big smiles and "come pick me up" flirtations and then gets upset when someone takes her up on it.

The instant I see that look, I want her back.  For some strange reason, people resist me and insist that she's fine.  Um, no.  You don't understand, for that look to cross her face and for a tear to begin to form, that's extraordinary behavior for her.  Seriously, the only times I've seen it is at these gatherings and when I've clipped the skin when going for the fingernail.  So I've seen that lip tremble maybe a total of about 3 times in that last 3 months.  Give me back the baby, let me reassure her that things are fine and I promise I'll give her back to you once she's all fine and dandy!  Believe me, I want to eat my breakfast while others entertain the babies just as much as others want to entertain the babies!

For now, this is awesome, but I know it's eventually going to come back and bite me in the butt.  In a few months, I'm sure they'll become crying machines and I'll have developed zero coping skills for it.  Despite everyone telling me that Tina is fine and they can calm her down and stop her from crying, I really don't think they can.  It's being picked up and held by someone she doesn't recognize that's upsetting her to begin with so how is continuing that going to calm her?  Besides, she has about the same amount of coping skills for crying as I have.  If she's allowed to really get going, I'm not sure any of us will be able to pull her back and she might go into complete, irretrievable meltdown.  So I always insist on taking her back and making it stop before it starts.

Is almost no crying common at this age or do I have just have extraordinarily easy babies?  When do the inevitable meltdowns really get going?  I'm getting scared that when they do cry, I'll have no idea how to handle it and I'll just go all flailing all over like I did the first couple of months.

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Each girl showed off two more teeth today.  Charlotte will be rocking the bucktoothed beaver look with her two top center teeth and Tina will be styling more of a down home hillbilly appearance with her two top side teeth.

Our morning routine, or, how my husband saved my life

This one is for the dads out there.  All you dads who are looking at your stressed out wife and not really understanding why they are so stressed out, or what you can do about it.

My husband is blessed with the ability to fall asleep at a moments notice.  I however, am not.  In the early weeks of parenting, my inability to just fall asleep added to my torture.  I would have about an hour before the girls would be up again and even though I was completely exhausted, it still took me about a half hour to fall asleep leaving me with only a handful of minutes to actually sleep.  Once I did, I was woken up by crying babies and that feeling of crap that you get when you've only slept a few minutes.  The cycle would feed on itself as I started fearing going to sleep because the moment I did, it meant the next thing I would know was screaming babies and the rush to prepare bottles and make the crying stop.  In a way, sleep became very unappealing.  It almost became more restful to just stay awake and futz around for those few precious moments of happy, sleeping babies.

Eventually my husband realized what was happening and came to my rescue.  He bought me earplugs.  We moved the baby monitor to his side of the bed.  He started getting up in the middle of the night to tend to babies while I slept through.  We had an agreement, if he needed me to help, he would wake me up, but if he could handle it alone, he would let me sleep.

At first, he generally let me sleep through one baby awake cycle per night and after that, I would have to get up when the babies woke up to pump while he did the feedings.  That one chunk of sleep gave me some of my brain back.  I still had issues, but they slowly started getting a little better.  As time went on, the girls would sleep longer and we both got a chunk of sleep.

We still found it unpleasant to wake up to crying babies though.  I mean really, who wants to wake up that way?  So we started anticipating their wake up times, and we'd set our alarm to wake up about a half hour before we expected them to, prepped bottles, and did a dream feed.  During this time, I would take my portable pump and would pump as we did the dream feed to minimize the time we both had to be awake.

I was still having trouble because I was still only getting bits and pieces of sleep.  So sometimes, K would get up by himself and do the dream feeds alone.  Then he started feeling the effects of all of these night feedings and lack of sleep so he would stop setting his alarm and just let the babies wake him up.  As he got more confidant that he could handle it by himself, he stopped waking me up to help and the girls started rewarding him by sleeping longer and longer between feedings.

By allowing me to sleep several hours during the night, this made it almost impossible for me to assist when I did wake up because I was so engorged that the first thing I simply had to do was pump.  The portable pump is great, but not as good as the one we rent from the hospital and when I was that full, I really needed to just sit down and use the hospital pump.  So as we drifted out of night time wakings and into sleeping through the night and just starting our day early in the morning, K was still in the habit of taking care of the morning care cycle for the girls.

This brings us to now.  Life is good and my husband is the reason.  Lately, his work schedule is often the midshift so he doesn't get any time with the girls after work.  He's often walking in the door a few minutes after I've put the girls down.  Sometimes I can keep them awake long enough for him to rock with one for a few minutes, but usually they need to go down before he gets that chance.  So he takes the morning shift with them and lets me sleep a bit longer.

Unless he has to leave early to open the store, we've fallen into a morning routine that works really well for us.  The girls wake him up somewhere between 7:30-8:30am.  Ok, I kind of wake up too, but he gets out of bed and takes the monitor with him so I can fall right back to sleep.  He gets them changed and fed and does play time with them.  They go down for a nap between 9-10am and he comes to get me up.  Depending on his work schedule, if there's time, he'll go back to bed for a quick nap and I'll do a Starbucks run and then come home and do my morning pump.  If the girls wake up while I'm stuck at the machine, he gets to work on their second breakfast (we're raising hobbits apparently).  Then we'll share in the care duties until he needs to start getting ready for work and I take over.

I just love this.  I love that he's cool with this routine and that he enjoys having some time with the girls.  I love that I have a husband who found a way to help me and does it simply because he wants me to be happy, not because he wants some sort of credit.  I love that letting me sleep a few extra hours is no longer a favor he's doing for me, but rather it's just the routine that works for us and I can count on it.  I love that I have a husband who is just as involved in the parenting as I am and doesn't need me to help him do it.  Other than a little more familiarity with their daytime schedule, there's really nothing that I know about how to care for them that he doesn't know.  I love that I don't have to encourage him to interact with his girls, or to get off the video game and actually DO something, he just does it because it's a part of our lives now.


If I had married one of those jerks who thinks he shouldn't ever be a parent because he goes to work every day, who gets angry when the wife just begs him to take ONE night feeding a week so she can sleep for 4 solid hours, who has to "unwind" with 5 hours of xbox after work, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have survived the early months.

I'm grateful every day that I married a real man instead of a guy or a boy.  Real men make babies and wives happy.  This is the type of thing my husband is doing when I'm stuck pumping.  That's a man my friends.