Toddlers Eating Vegetables

BB's Breakfast.

When Baby Buckshot (Toddler Buckshot now?) first started eating solids, he ate everything and loved it. New textures, new flavors, something that isn't breastmilk! And when I was pregnant, and now that I'm breastfeeding, I make sure to eat lots of vegetables so that BB would get familiar with vegetable flavors. Now that's he toddling, it seems those efforts were less than effective!

After coming back from MommyCon Newport Beach, and learning that toddlers need to be exposed to a vegetable at least 7 times before acquiring a taste for it, I came up with some ways to help this along.

1. Bake into muffins or bread. More fibrous vegetables do very well in baked goods when shredded. Think carrots, zucchini, beets, even celery. If going for a sweet bread, try adding in fruit along with the veggie to make it more pleasant. If going for a savory bread, adding in some shredded cheese often helps the item be a little more kid friendly.

2. Infuse water. I have this really awesome FlavFusion Infuser Water Bottle that I put various things to spruce up my water with and BB LOVES the thing. When he sees it, he immediately wants some to drink. So, one day, I added in spinach and apple slices to the infuser. I've also done cucumber and mint, which I personally enjoy anyway. Just don't add a sour fruit along with a vegetable in the infuser because the combination of sour from fruit and slight bitterness from vegetables did not go over well with BB.



3. Make "ice cream." BB, early on, found a love of eating cold and frozen items. A way that I've used this to my advantage is by taking frozen fruits, a handful of greens and blending them with hemp or coconut milk and creating a frozen treat. He doesn't get as excited about it as he does real ice cream, but like Dr. Alan Greene said, it only takes one bite, multiple times.

4. Blend into soup/dip. BB recently learned that he loves dipping. When given a soup he doesn't like to eat, he will, however, consume the entire soup with a carrot used as a dipping mechanism. I saw him do it with tomato soup. Naturally, it's easy to blend steamed vegetables into a hummus dip or just simply make a soup out of it when blended with chicken broth, which goes a long way with getting BB to like it.

A video posted by hoshnasi (@hoshnasi) on Oct 10, 2014 at 5:22pm PDT

5. Put into a sausage patty. Turns out, toddlers love sausage. I spoke with a number of moms and they all said the same thing. Likely because they are nugget-like in shape and easy to hold. Making sausage at home is easy and adding a new vegetable into the mix is relatively easy.

6. Mix in a salad. Sometimes, I'll steam a vegetable and mix it in with a fresh fruit salad for BB. I cut everything around the same size and make it really colorful and inevitably, he'll eat a few bites of the vegetable. I am one sneaky mommy.

7.  Eat together. For some reason, toddlers assume whatever their caregivers are eating is delicious. BB is no exception. If I am obviously enjoying something, he immediately wants to try it. This is a good way to show kids what the vegetable actually looks and feels like without adding in to something else. Sure, sometimes BB will spit out a vegetable, but the fact that he's had a bite is one step in the right direction.

One day soon, my goal of having a vegetable loving child will be achieved.

Baby Mum Mum Review

When I was a kid, my grandmother used to give me Chinese rice crackers. They were wrapped two in a bag, always perfectly crispy and airy and my brother and I would eat 5 bags at a time. They were also sodium laden with the equivalent of a whole package of MSG (mmm... so good.)

When I heard about Baby Mum-Mums, they sounded so familiar. When I looked them up online, they looked so familiar. Naturally, I went searching for this remnant of my childhood, food memories of my grandmother that I could share with my son as long as they were no longer sodium filled. 

I went to the local store and they had store brand rice rusk snacks, which weren't very good, but had the crispy to the bite but melt in the mouth texture. I immediately reached out to Hot Kid about their Baby Mum Mums so I could let Baby Buckshot try some since he was moving into eating solids.

Baby Mum-Mums are basically the perfect baby snacks. They come in a variety of flavors, organic options and, like the rice crackers of my childhood, come two in a bag with the rice rusk texture, without the MSG of my youth. 

Here are the highlights:

Perfect for Traveling. Seriously, if you have ever accidentally had a canister of Gerber puffs open up in your Rebecca Minkoff diaper bag, you understand how brilliant this individually wrapped packaging is. Getting to avoid that horrendous puff dust over everything in the car is also a huge plus.

Great size for Baby Led Weaning. A lot of baby snack foods are small which means baby has to be old enough to use the pincher grasp or they're just shoving a whole handful of puffs in their mouth which ends up in gagging.  Sure, there's gagging in Baby Led Weaning but Baby Mum Mums are large enough for young eaters to grab a hold of and gnaw on.

Teething. Speaking of gnawing on, these are great teething biscuits. Seriously, they start out hard like a cracker and as drool from the teething gets absorbed by the cracker, it gets soft enough for baby to gum.

Gluten Free. Not only do they come in organic varieties, they are gluten free, which allows some of the hip parents in metropolitan areas to stick with their no-wheat diets. Because let's be honest, we all steal a couple of bites here and there of our babies snacks. To make sure they're safe, of course.

Doesn't get stale.  Stale baby snacks are the worst. I'm not sure that Baby Buckshot can tell when something is stale but I can. For the life of me, I can't figure out why packages of baby snacks are never able to seal tight enough to keep the food from losing its crunch. Individual packaging is a no brainer in preventing the stale issue. Which, again, is probably not that important to BB, but is very important to me.

Subtle taste. There are flavors like Carrot, Apple, Banana and they all taste like those things but without the sugar or salt. If you've ever tried one of those gastromy based restaurants where there's an aroma that is released when opening a plate, it's kind of like that. Just the essence of those flavors. This is particularly good for early eaters because it doesn't ruin their tastebuds for healthy vegetables or fruit with artificially sweet or salty seasonings.

But hey, you don't have to take my word for it. I'm going to send a few lucky winners some samples. Enter below to receive a few individual wrapped packages of a few different Baby Mum Mum flavors for you and your little ones to try yourselves! Multiple winners on this one. ;)

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