by Heather
With our rookie babies, we made lots and lots of good fresh pureed baby food. Inspired by Super Baby Food I started with simple blended pear and eased into whipped avocado, but eventually I had vats of different combos going and I would puree for my mini-eater and save the chunky stuff for older Julian.
I had energy and creativity and time. The good news about all that is by freezing my energy, creativity, and time into little frozen food cubes, I could leverage thaw them later when I didn’t.
Carolyn at NYC Moms Blog went one giant step further and organized her own baby food coop. Brilliant. Because as long as your steaming and smashing a head of broccoli, why not make enough for the neighborhood and be done with it?!
My friend and former boss, Colleen, also went a few steps further than me in creating healthy organic combos for her son, Calder. Her recipes for baby quinoa and lentil surprises are in the Rookie Moms TasteBook. Check it out.
Related activities:
Swap your food cubes
Cook and freeze
Feed a picky toddler
by Whitney
With over 100 million iPods sold as of this month, I figure most of you have one. If you have a Nano or a regular iPod (not a Shuffle) you can put pictures of your baby on your iPod and eliminate the need to carry photos. Trust me, on your iPod, photos look 80 billion times better than on your phone.
So here’s the tutorial. If you already know this, just move along, geek. I just thought I’d share because it seems to me that a large percentage of baby-owners are also digital picture-takers and iPod-listeners, and that sadly, very few pictures actually make it off of the camera.
Prerequisite: You need to be organizing your pictures in some logical way on your computer. At my house, each folder is marked with the month and year. Ideally, you do not keep every single shot you take. If you do, then you’ll want to create a new folder of just the photos you want on your iPod.
- Open iTunes
- Connect your iPod to your computer using the normal method (white USB cable)
- When the iPod icon appears in iTunes, select it from the left-hand column
- Click the Photos tab, highlighted in the screenshot above.
- Select the “Sync photos from” checkbox and choose the folder that contains the photos you want to copy from the pop-up menu.
Apple warns, “It may take a while to copy all your photos the first time you perform a sync. Subsequent syncs should take less time.”
For more iPod tips, consider this book: iPod: The Missing Manual
by Whitney
I read this in a magazine recently. You can get a sense of your baby’s future height based on the heights of the two biological parents. For boys, add 5 inches to mom’s height. Your son will be between that height and his daddy’s height. For girls, subtract 5 inches from her dad’s height. Your daughter will be between that height and mama’s height.
In my case this is not a helpful predictor at all because with a 13 inch height difference between me and my husband, we still end up with a 7-inch range for a prediction. At least I know my son will be taller than me. Maybe it calculates more precisely for you.
by Whitney
Has being a mom become your only hobby? Spend today thinking about what other hobby you would like bring back to your life or start, and make a plan to get into it.
I like to make stuff and read about making stuff on craft blogs. It took me a while to get back into it after Julian was born, but it really felt good. Lots of people say that exercise is the hobby they’ve been missing. Um, not me.
This picture of Heather was taken by me in June of 2002. We decided to stay up all night and run around the city. We went for a run at 10.30 PM, ate tapas, went to an Oxygen bar, saw a Tom Cruise movie at 1.45 am, and then watched the World Cup on a big screen projecter image at a friend’s house. We took lots of cabs and finished our adventure at 6.20 in the morning.
Little did we know that we would be staying up all night taking care of babies a couple years later. Ironically we made shirts to commemorate this evening that said “Not a girl, not yet a soccer mom”, a play on the Britney Spears song. Apparently we did know what was coming.
That pretty much sums up other stuff I like to do: run around doing weird stuff with Heather, taking pictures of weird stuff we do together, make t-shirts about the weird stuff we’ve done.
If you like to rock climb, quilt, or go to poetry slams, you should keep doing it. If you’ve already done it, brag to us here.
