Making Baby Food

This is my current research topic. Lil Hoot will be 4 months next week and just around the bend will be starting 'solid' foods. She won't be ready next week but I'm prepping for her to be ready sometime between 5-6 months. We will be discussing it with her doctor just in case she is ready to start before her 6 month appointment. So...my main source of information has been Super Baby Food but I have also read The Baby Food Bible and several baby food "cook books".

In all honesty, I'm pretty overwhelmed by the amount of information and guidelines. I understand why people decide it's too complex to feed their baby homemade food. But then I think, I manage to feed myself everyday and I will manage to feed her table food as a child, shouldn't I be able to figure out how to feed her as an infant too?

So here are my questions - did you make food yourself? If so, what did you make? How did you start out and when? Please share with me any tips or tricks that I need to know!

ETA: Do you have recommendations for utensils, sippy cups, dishes, storage containers, etc.? Please share!

Thanks in advance!

Before I Became a Mom

Prior to being Lil Hoot's Mom I couldn't truly understand (despite having been told)...

• the importance of nap times
• the challenge of breastfeeding
• how difficult cloth diapering could be
• being insecure and indecisive so often
  
• what to do all day with an infant
  

But now...

• I do everything I can to make sure Lil Hoot gets her naps
• we spent 5 weeks getting breastfeeding right
• we are still trying to fit into cloth diapers
  
• I pray constantly for confidence
• I could watch her play or sleep or eat for hours

Other things I've noticed...

• I never wear shoes
• My back always aches
• I'm the first to clean up bodily fluids - poo, pee, puke, you name it - and the last one to get the chance to eat
• No matter how hard I try, I never make it to bed early

Make-shift Mobile

Lil Hoot's room has been void of anything other than necessities until recently. Once she started sleeping in the room for naps I decided that it would probably be nice to put some things in it for her to look at, especially when she decided that she wanted to talk herself to sleep in her crib rather than have me soothe her to sleep. So I finally got the artwork done that I'd been planning for about 8 months (I'll post on that later) and decided to find something to make a simple mobile.

We had some stuffed animals left over from her pack 'n' play which came with a play gym that she never liked so I swiped those, bought a wooden star and sunshine at Michael's, painted them with some Folk Art paints and strung it all together with a cheap ribbon from Wal-Mart. It's not the fanciest and it does lean a bit to one side, but she thinks it's fun and spends a bit of time babbling at the animals. I'm sure glad she's not too picky!

Puppet Time!

We noticed some time ago that Lil Hoot will pay attention to our hands acting as puppets even without having a real puppet. I started searching for puppets, and not dinky little finger puppets, no I wanted a real hand puppet. I figured it couldn't be too hard to make one and I haven't had any luck finding one in a store so.... I searched the net for how to make a puppet and found this great tutorial on eHow - How to Make Puppets Of course, I added my own touches and changed a few things based on the materials I had available. The first puppet is certainly a bit...uh..."special", but the first one is always the worst one and Lil Hoot isn't picky. The second puppet I had a better idea of how things come together. I was a bit more careful and just generally took more time to make things symmetrical.

Matt had fun voicing the puppets!

Lil Hoot wasn't sure what to think, but she likes the orange one's hair.

Now, I don't think these puppets will work well for toddlers or kiddos - they're held together primarily with hot glue and the mouth is cardboard. If I want to make a more lasting puppet then I'll have to do some more tweaking.

Lil Hoot's Boheme Sweater

I just finished up this sweater - Boheme. I used the 6 month size pattern but my gauge is tighter than hers so it's smaller than intended, which works well for me since Lil Hoot is on the tiny side. I followed the pattern word for word until the bind off. I didn't want to do a picot edge so I searched the internet for a crochet scallop and did that instead. I had the the dragonfly buttons in my stash and had been dying to find something for them!