Baby (Food) Maker

When I got pregnant with James, all I heard was how expensive babies are. Don't get me wrong, they can be expensive, but I am proud to say that for our family, babies aren't really that expensive.

Since we made babies later than our friend
made babies, we were able to get plenty of things handed down to us. As in, toys upon toys upon toys. Some toys were ones we had given to their children for birthdays. Pretty funny...

We tried cloth diapering, but we weren't very good at it. I thought I would try to bring it back with Catherine, but I had so many leftover diapers from James (despite an expiration date on diaper boxes, I can assure you they don't expire) that it just seemed natural to try and get rid of those first. So, that's what we did. And we have yet to break out the cloth diapers.

We had a lot of hand-me-down clothes from friends, relatives and neighbors that had barely been worn or still had the tags on it. Don't get me wrong, I still buy James clothes, especially now that he is getting bigger and he outgrows clothes so fast. But we haven't really had to buy too much for our kids.

Lastly, when James was about 4 months, we started him on rice cereal. We gradually worked up to solids and when I saw how much jars of baby food cost, I was not about to do that. I had read about making your own baby food, and decided I wanted to at least try.

Eric bought me a Baby Bullet with all the accessories, and I made baby food for James. Tonight, I made pureed pears for Catherine, using the ripe pears we picked off our pear tree this weekend.

Just call me a regular pioneer woman.

With two pears, I made two weeks worth of dinner for Catherine. Just dinner because otherwise, she still gets breast milk. To get two weeks worth of dinner in baby food jars, I would have had to spend upwards of $1.50 per meal, multiplied by 14. That's $21. No thanks!! Kind of like our $50 formula that would last us a week. I don't think I will be doing that when I could do it for next to nothing.

So there you have it. It took me 26 minutes to steam the pears (put in device with water and push start), a minute to mix them in the baby bullet, and a couple minutes to put them in ice cube trays. After they freeze, I just have to put the cubes in a freezer bag and tadaa! Baby food for a couple weeks. If I have to hardly work over paying money for baby food, I will choose the work. The best thing I like about it is I know exactly what is going into her food. I am not an organic freak by any means, but when it comes to my babies, I am concerned with what goes in their bodies.

Now, stay tuned for how those pears work for Catherine's digestive tract... Another blog post for another time!