Levi is child number three and with my vast domestic skills you’d think I’d be a baby food making pro by now. I’m not.

When Mira first started solids I fed her jarred food before realizing jarred bananas were just, well bananas. After a few months of buying it off the shelf, I found a book about making baby food and dove in head long.

I spent an entire day toiling away, dolloping tablespoons worth of pureed foods into ice cube trays. I froze, I bagged, I labeled and I failed. No matter what I did I could not cajole her into eating anything I so lovingly prepared. Nothing, nada, ZIP. The kid would have rather starved then let a homemade pureed pea pass her lips. Considering her weight barely hit the 5% percentile, I gave in. I could have been sad but instead I comforted myself with the idea that the vitamin C they claimed to be adding to their jarred stuff was actually crack rock.

When Tessa came along, I prepared a few things at home but still relied heavily on premade alternatives. I didn’t have time to poop, let alone whip up some apple blueberry delight. This was a difficult and busy phase of my life- a tiny baby (this is said in terms of age because Tessa, like Levi, was anything BUT tiny) and what we later discovered to be, an autistic 18 month old who actually required more care then the baby.

So here I find myself again at that critical point in my child’s life- FOOD. Solid food. Food that is not produced as a natural biological act of my body and can be whipped out at a moment’s notice. Food that requires gear like wittle spoons and special bowls and bibs (oh please lord help me find cute well priced bibs cause nothing says neglectful mama like an ugly bib).

Things are a bit different this time. My other kids are older and theoretically more self sufficient so I should have 5 minutes to run a blender without worrying about my car keys being inserted up the dog’s butt or my cell phone being flushed (should right? RIGHT?). Also, since my lovely friend gifted me an immersion blender after my regular blender died in a big blue electric flash (followed by smoke and then my husband running out into the backyard in his underwear with it, trying to avoid setting off our fire alarm), I guess I should bite the bullet and make my kid some homemade pureed crap.

Well I DID bite that bullet, though instead of whirring up some dog turds I started with white rice, nectarines, and carrots. Levi’s first meal was straight up nectarines - a bit too acidic for this refluxy kid

I added in the whipped rice and though at first he was a bit suspicious

apparently I hit some sort of baby nirvana with this mixture, because he figured out how to grab my hand and help jam the spoon in his mouth. Carrots have not been quite as big of a hit but my little piggy still wolfs them down.

I’m going to try to keep him totally off the crack rock jarred stuff, especially since another friend (of Bess and Hank fame) claims to have found what looked an awful lot like a pubic hair at the bottom of an organic baby food spinach lasagna delight, and I’m going to need lots of support from you smart folks out there in blog land. Do you make your own baby food? Anyone have some baby food making pointers? Maybe a recipe or two for when I start combining fruits and veggies?