I haven’t updated in awhile — since it’s really, really hard to cook for a toddler when you’re in the first trimester and can barely stomach the thought of food! 
So for the last few weeks, Sly and I have shared a lot of pretzels, plain pasta, grilled cheese sandwiches, and other fairly inoffensive foods that my morning-sickness-wracked self can stand. And I’ve relied a lot on my freezer stash of veggies, meat loaf or turkey loaf muffins, etc. — as well as my husband’s cooking skills, which luckily are as good or better than mine.
But last night, I cooked and ate my first real meal in weeks — mashed potatoes and breaded pork chops, which Sly shared with us (mostly the potatoes; the pork chops weren’t a huge hit). So I’m hoping that this is a good sign that after a rough first trimester, I’m on the verge of being back to normal — and back in the kitchen!
There are some foods that, while not particularly healthy (or outright not-healthy!), that I have no intention of completely banning from my house. I loved them as a kid, sometimes still eat some of them — and I see no reason why, as occasional treats, that my daughter can’t enjoy them as well. If she likes them.
Fruit snacks. Canned pasta with meatballs. Kraft mac and cheese. Popsicles. Cap’n Crunch cereal. And probably a dozen other things I’m not remembering right now.
While I don’t have any intention of letting Sly dig into the Cap’n Crunch any time soon (the occasional box that makes its way home is reserved for Mama!), I have picked up a few of the other things. And when I’m looking for conventional or convenience foods for Sly, I almost always try to see if there’s something similar but organic.
Annie’s Organics are really great for this. When Sly was getting started on finger foods, the Cinnabunnies cereal made a great snack. More recently, the bunny fruit snacks were a bit hit with Sly (and make a nice addition when we have to pack a lunch).
Today we dipped into the world of Bernie O’s — Annie’s version of Spaghetti O’s. It wasn’t a big hit with Sly (she was much more enthusiastic about the broccoli-rice-and-cheese casserole that I gave her along with the pasta) but I still appreciate having the organic option.
We are a pretty die-hard Yobaby yogurt house. Sly would happily chow down a container of the stuff at every meal — and considering that yogurt and cheese are still her main source of calcium, I’m glad she likes it so much.
That said, we’re trying something new this week and so far it’s a hit. Horizon (maker of organic milk and right down the road from us in Broomfield, CO) has a new kiddie yogurt called Little Blends that combines fruit and veggies. I’ve seen two flavors: strawberry/carrot and apple/butternut squash. We tried the latter, and Sly gulped it down just as quickly as she eats the all-fruit kind.
For the apple/butternut squash, one of the four-oz. containers includes:
- 100 calories
- 25% daily protein
- 20% of Vitamin A
- 4% of Vitamin C
- 4% iron
- 8% Vitamin D
- 20% calcium
I think the Little Blends will be a semi-regular addition to Sly’s diet, but I still prefer Yobaby for a few reasons.
The Little Blends are not certified organic, but marketed under the fuzzier “natural” label. Some of the ingredients are still organic, but not, say, the butternut squash puree that’s used.
The price is about the same as Yobaby (around $3 per package) — but with Yobaby, I get six four-oz. yogurt containers and Little Blends only has four.
Still, for toddlers who fuss about veggies, this is definitely something to try! Though it’s also worth noting that these include orange veggies that are high in Vitamin A, as opposed to green veggies. In our house at least, the green ones are the real challenge; I can almost always get Sly to eat baked sweet potato fries, but I certainly can’t say that about peas or beans.
Of all the things for Sly to react to, I never would’ve expected it to be syrup. Not a major reaction, but enough to notice.
I gave her french toast, green beans and most of a pear for dinner, and for the first time I put a little syrup — plain old Log Cabin, admittedly it wasn’t something all-natural — on her plate to see if she’d like to try it. I think it was flat-out too sweet; she made a face and wouldn’t eat anything that was dipped in it.
But even trying it left a nice red mark around her mouth. Interestingly, a big drop soaked through her shirt and she ended up with a red mark on her chest, too. Guess we won’t be trying that again soon!
Sly has had very few reactions to anything — minor red-mouth with cantaloupe when I first introduced it; something similar for cinnamon; and a pale pink rash on her chest and back from strawberry-flavored applesauce. The cantaloupe reaction was gone when we tried it again a few months later, and the same goes for the cinnamon. I haven’t tried strawberries with her since the applesauce rash, although my pedi said to wait six months and try again. We’re past the six month point, I guess I’m just still a little more nervous about that one than the others and just haven’t gotten around to trying again.
She had no reaction at all to peanut butter, which we started at 14 months. None to fish, either; which I’m happy about, since my mom has a pretty severe fish allergy.
I try not to stress about reactions too much, especially since she hasn’t had anything remotely serious and according to my pedi, she’s likely to grow out of the kind of minor-league stuff she’d had so far. Which so far has proved true. But it still surprised me to see something like syrup — syrup?!?! — cause irritation like that.
Vacationing with a toddler gives a whoooole new meaning to the phrase “the comforts of home.”
And man, was I missing the comforts of my home on our recent vacation. Especially at mealtimes.
We tried taking Sly camping and then to a local resort for a week. Let’s just say that the tent-camping went so incredibly well that we ended up at a hotel and then came home a day early. 
But toddler meltdowns aside, I got so frustrated with The Kids Menu. Sly ate a lot of macaroni and cheese and grilled cheese. Which I can live with for a brief vacation. But vegetables were practically non-existent — other than french fries. It got to the point where I got excited when one kids’ menu offered “fresh veggies” as a side. They turned out to be dessicated carrot and celery sticks with ranch sauce.
It makes me wonder — which came first? Restaurants not offering veggies to kids, or kids not eating them?
It actually turned out all right, though — Sly’s daddy convinced her to try the carrot sticks, and so we’ve added one fresh veggie to her list of will-eats. And I gave her some of my steamed broccoli.
So even though tent camping didn’t work out, having a bunch of our own food was a blessing. I learned that luckily, hotel room tap water gets hot enough to cook instant oatmeal packets. Along with cereal bars and granola bars, that made most of Sly’s breakfasts. So we were able to feed her right away in the mornings and avoid Hungry Grumpy Sly. And I felt a lot better if she had a breakfast that didn’t involve something fried on the kids menu.
Between preparing for, taking and recovering from vacation with a toddler, it’s taken me awhile to get back to looking over Sly’s week of menus.
Overall, I’m pretty happy with the variety. There was a lot of oatmeal and various fruits for breakfast. Peanut butter sandwiches only came up twice; I went a little heavy on the chicken pot pie that week; and of course there was the daily yogurt.
We came out so-so on veggies. She ate quite a bit of broccoli-rice-and-cheese casserole and loves her sweet potato fries, and I relied on the veggies in the pot pies quite a bit. Could definitely do better there.
But it’s really helpful to have a big-picture view of Sly’s diet, for that week at least!
Woo-hoo, my last day of tracking the makeup of Sly’s meals. For this week, anyhow!
Breakfast: The usual oatmeal, with applesauce and cinnamon. Plus graham cracker bits smeared with cream cheese.
Lunch: I took the leftover pasta from the other day, mixed it with spaghetti sauce, and heated that up for Sly’s lunch. She also ate a passel of sweet potato fries — man, that girl looooves her sweet potato! About half the pasta she threw overboard, though. (Sigh.) The daily yogurt came at lunch today.
Dinner: A ridiculously enormous amount of broccoli, rice and cheese casserole. Plus some applesauce.
She also got a mid-afternoon treat of some Annie’s Organic fruit snacks, after I took her for a much-needed haircut and she didn’t shriek her way through it.
Thanks for putting up with food minutiae this week! I’ll do a recap and analysis soon and then get back to fun-ner things!
Okay, these were today’s specials:
Breakfast: oatmeal with smooshed up blackberries. What she threw off her tray last night, Sly was fine with eating in oatmeal. Also, most of a banana.
Lunch: Leftover chicken pot pie, about a quarter of a grilled cheese sandwich, and some diced pear.
Dinner: The other half of the avocado she had for lunch the other day, plus most of a mixed fruit cup and a cup of yogurt.
Today felt like a bit of a cop-out, cooking-wise. I was exhausted and pretty much made do with whatever came to hand, especially when it got to dinner. But I do feel good that Sly ate her avocado — lots of good fats! — and avoided throwing things on the floor today.
Another day, another three meals!
Breakfast: Oatmeal with blueberry-pomegranate sauce and a handful of frozen blueberries. Plus the last of the nectarines (Sly devoured the whole thing) and some Yogurt Burst Cheerios.
Lunch: half of a peanut butter sandwich on whole wheat, half an avocado, and most of a cereal bar. That was a really good lunch (in terms of her eating almost everything)!
Which is good, because dinner was pretty much a FAIL.
Dinner: I offered some diced colby-jack and blackberries while I was finishing up cooking. (Sly was begging to go in her highchair, which means she’s hungry.) But she threw all of it to the dogs. (Argh! Those berries were organic! And so juicy that they went SPLAT all over the kitchen floor. Sigh.)
Her main dinner was whole-wheat fusilli pasta (I like the Archer Farms brand from SuperTarget) mixed with olive oil and peas, and sprinkled with parmesan and parsley. She ate some of the pasta, nary a single pea, and then amused herself by hurling still more food to our dogs. I distracted her with a yogurt cup, and then dinner was over.
That very frustrating meal is still fresh in my mind, and I’m grinding my teeth a little. Gah, some days this whole food thing just completely gets the best of me. It’s really irritating to watch that food get tossed on the floor and/or go to waste.
At least I made enough pasta for her to have another partial meal of it tomorrow. And dog-toddler relations are probably at an all-time high.
Yet another day of chronicling Sly’s meals. So we started off with …
Breakfast: Scrambled eggs! (I bet you were expecting oatmeal, hmmm?) Made “dadda-style” with half-and-half and some shredded cheese. Plus most of a banana. She adores bananas and would happily wolf down down one entirely on her own — but I try to limit her intake a bit. If I don’t, her otherwise-regular-as-clockwork poops get … delayed, shall we say?
Lunch: Fish sticks (right now I’m using Van de Kamp’s sticks made from whole fillets); diced pear; corn; a cup of yogurt; and some colby-jack cheese. Sly took one or two bites from each of the four fish sticks (Sigh. I don’t get this. What makes the second half inferior to the first half?), gobbled the pear and corn, and played with the cheese.
She used to make any kind of cheese disappear like magic. Now I’m lucky if I can get her to eat a slice of American, and she seems to have completely forgotten how much she loved cheddar, colby, jack, and mozzarella. I keep offering it, but it’s kind of discouraging when all she wants to do is throw it to our two dogs.
Dinner was chicken pot pie — only this time it was “grown-up” pot pie, not the pot pie muffin she had last night. Made with peas, carrots and corn — lots more veggie than crust. She ate everything on her plate and then wanted mine, so I gave her seconds. Plus more cheese (I gave up and offered a slice of American this time; she ate it all). And another cup of yogurt.
Overall, a pretty good eating day!
