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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Infant No Refridgerator Travel Snack Options: 6 months to 1 year.

We've been doing a lot of traveling this summer which means long car rides and hotel stays. Sometimes in hotel rooms without mini refrigerators and other conveniences. Here is a list of my favorite and not so favorite travel friendly snacks.

Wheat bread. If bought the same day as hitting the road, all natural wheat bread will last for at least a few days out of the refrigerator without growing mold. It's low mess, easy to eat and not a bad snack for mommy and daddy either.

Fruit. Pick fruit that stands up well to travel, like bananas and apples. Berries and thin skinned fruits usually need refrigeration within a couple of days before they get mushy. I also didn't recommend oranges because they can cause diaper rash in some babies due to the citrus.

Gerber Instant Oatmeal. This brand oatmeal comes in organic and doesn't require hot water. Just mix with water, breastmilk or ready to drink formula and it's ready for baby to eat. Baby Buckshot enjoys this very much with some fruit mixed in also.

Gerber Veggie Pick-ups. I thought this would be a brilliant way to get BB some veggies on to the go. Unfortunately, sometimes he'll eat this. Other times, he won't touch it with a ten foot pole. If I could find a flavor he liked, I would definitely bring this on any trip because they are prepackaged in easily portable containers. The pieces are also soft enough to mush but in some cases, they are too small. I would prefer these in a glass container instead of the plastic and will try to find an alternative.

Baby Mum-Mums. I am a huge fan of these snacks because they are prepackaged for the perfect serving size of two biscuits in a bag. When traveling, allows me to take just a couple and not have to worry about putting them in a ziplock to stay fresh and dry or having to drag around a large container of the same item. They also come in a variety of flavors, including organic options, that BB really loves. I actually eat the plain organic ones as a snack myself. When Baby Mum-Mums sent me their flavors to sample, I was really thrilled as their best flavor is actually the organic carrot, which I could not find in stores.

Sesame Melba Toast. My husband told me that he remembered that melba toast was for babies, especially during teething so when I saw it at Trader Joe's, I naturally picked up a box. BB really liked to just suck on them, though he did not end up eating a lot of them. More like a suck until soggy and then toss. They were also a good adult snack. I might not take these with me again on a trip because they cause an awfully crumbly mess.

Gerber Little Crunchies/Puffs. These are the equivalent of baby cheetos, which I would normally not want to give to my child, but I made the mistake of letting him try one once and he loved them. Between these and the Gerber puffs (not pictured), when BB is having a meltdown in the car, a couple of these actually calms him down. I don't like to give him a lot of them though, because it really is junk food.