Baby Food

With the notable exception of Bull, all of my children are on the long, skinny side of things. This is no surprise. None of my siblings could be described as large and bone structure-wise I’m one of the smallest. We’re not tall, but S’s family is all closer to six feet than five (yes, even the girls!) and most of them could best be described as scrawny. With all of those genetics I was completely unsurprised when Mouse at a year was in the 98th percentile for height and the 10th for weight!

They all eat well and getting everyone to gain and grow has never been a problem, but they also all either took a bottle or nursed until well past a year. Until Jack.

Jack weaned himself about three weeks ago and refuses to drink milk from a cup or even consider a bottle! He eats like a champ, getting through a cup of food or more at a sitting and snacking between meals as well! The problem is that I am used to feeding the baby as a supplement at this age, which means mostly vegetables and fruits, with perhaps a little meat off of my plate. I’ve rarely made baby food in advance just used the grinder to break up things off of my plate and figured that most of the nutrition was coming from the bottle or breast.

Well! That simply isn’t enough food for the Jack! I’ve been finding that he’s often hungry and therefore fussy, and I’m not at all sure that he’s getting enough fat or protein in his diet. He’ll eat almost anything, so over the weekend I started putting a scoop of formula into each of his meals just stirring it into his applesauce or oatmeal.

I also decided to just make a large quantity of one or two foods that he could eat at each meal and then supplement that with food from my plate.

Yesterday I peeled and Buggle cut up five pounds of carrots. We cooked and pureed them and I’ll probably freeze some of them although he’s eating a tremendous amount of them! I expect him to be turning orange any day. That’s great from a vitamins and fiber perspective but not too good for fat and protein so I’ll be stirring formula into the carrots as I serve them.

I also cooked off one of my few remaining chickens from my sister’s farm. I just put the whole thing in a big pot,boiled it until it was tender, picked off the meat and ran it through the food processor then refrigerated it. The bones and skin went back into the broth to strengthen it as well as the water that I had cooked the carrots in. The resulting broth was strained last night and I’ll use some of it for cooking and add some of it to his meat to increase the fat content.

Needless to say I’ll be watching him closely to make sure he is gaining appropriately and any ideas you may have for increasing his fat and protein intake would be much appreciated.


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