Unlike deciding on whether or not to breastfeed, choosing to make our own baby food was something I knew I would want to do before I even became pregnant. Not sure why, it’s just something I wanted to try as a new mom and am very happy we did. Don’t get me wrong, we ensured we had several jars of baby food in the house at all times just in case, but I found making our own baby food was actually fairly simple and I really enjoyed doing it. I felt like D got to have much more of a variety of fruits and vegetables, from bananas to avocado and from carrots to brussels sprouts – D tried pretty much everything, even more than my husband and I would eat. It was so much fun to see what new foods D would like, or not like every other week and we were sure to capture many of those great moments on camera.

One thing I would have done differently is to ensure I started off with vegetables and continue with just vegetables for awhile. Once D got a taste for fruit he wasn’t as interested in the vegetables and we actually had to switch to jarred vegetables for certain ones, especially with peas and carrots for some reason. But boy was he a trooper with all fruits. He LOVED them, and still does to this day. He was such a fabulous eater from about 6 months to 18 months and I have to assume some of that was because we made our own baby food? I have to say…when he first started eating solids I thought I was golden. Like I said, he would eat pretty much anything. When packing lunches for daycare we would give him leftovers from dinner the night before, anything from meatloaf to lasagna to chicken pot pie. The daycare ladies would joke with us that he was the gourmet eater of the class. Well what happened? He’s still a pretty decent eater but he is much, MUCH fussier than ever before. That’ll have to be another blog post for another day…my struggles with a picky eater and hopefully how we overcame it (insert big smile here)!

Anyways, as with breastfeeding, there’s no right or wrong answer but I thoroughly enjoyed making our own baby food and will for sure do it again with our next child. If you choose to make your own baby food I’d be sure to try it all and not just stick to what mommy and daddy like. My husband would always say to me “why would you make him eat that? I don’t even like peas, why would he?” My response was “you’ll never know until you try!”