To Make Food, Or Buy It?

So NPP hits 6 months old, we have a little issue with solids (I know, I’m a bit behind on that info), we get threatened with having to take him to a feeding specialist (long story).  We come home that night, he and I have a “Come to Jesus” chat about needing to eat (I might have mentioned he would have to get more shots if he didn’t eat solids) and bada boom, realest guys in the room, he starts eating solids.  Fantastic.

So we start stockpiling baby food like we know we’ll be spending the next five years in a fallout shelter, right?

Wrong.

Have you ever stopped to take a look at the baby food aisle at a grocery store?  There’s a metric s-ton of foods to choose from.  Even worse?  Take a look at the nutrition label for some of those foods.  Three-quarters of them have more sugar than an Easter basket, half of them have ingredients I’ve never heard of, and it’s nearly impossible to decipher what the numbers mean!  So the obvious solution is to buy organic, right?

Wrong again.

I mean, it’s not wrong, but you’re pretty much going to have to pick up a second job if you want to feed your kid organic, pureed foods from the grocery store.  It’s not economical and if you’re a family on a budget, you’re going to be heavily tempted to pick up the cheaper stuff.  Welcome to America.

You can probably tell from the header image, then, that MOMPC and I decided to start making NPP’s food.  Buying fruit had to be cheaper, and we would know what was going into the food, so it was an obvious choice.

Except…maybe it wasn’t.  Don’t get me wrong, when we started making NPP’s food, I was totally onboard.  I was onboard, though, mostly because I wasn’t doing any of the work.  MOMPC would come home from work, steam the food, blend the food, and then store it.  As we learned in a previous post, however, that wasn’t following the law of DCDT, so we started working together as a team to get NPP’s food made.

So here’s the bottom line:

You might not actually be saving money, you’re definitely not saving time, but at least you know 99% of what’s going into your child’s mouth.  When faced with the question “To make food, or buy it?”, we decided to make it.  That doesn’t mean we don’t keep a few pre-made jars on-hand, just in case, but we both feel a lot better, knowing what’s going into the food, and how it got there.

I’ll be posting how we make the food, and what we use to make it in a future post.  In the meantime, what did you do for you kid(s)?  What are you planning on doing for your future child?  Have any tips to share?  Leave it all in the comments below!

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