Every week or so we go grocery shopping and make a bunch of baby food and juice. The reason is: the first (and only) jar of baby food I bought had 11 grams of sugar in it, it's only like 3oz and it had 11 grams?! That seemed ridiculous to me; the more research I did about store-bought baby food, the angrier I became. I wanted to know exactly what was going into Charles-Winston's belly and how could I feed him sugar when I won't even eat it?
Conveniently, we already had a puree blender, so I started making my own baby food, and same thing with juice, I wasn't satisfied with the amount of added sugar, so we bought a juicer. Now, it's a fun Sunday activity that the whole family participates in and we all love it. Mainly Benjamin and I drink the juice and (of course) only Charles-Winston eats the baby food. It gives us all time to be together as a family and eat healthy and have fun while doing it.
Charles-Winston LOVES his baby food especially bananas, and I was told that giving him real food, I needed to supplement liquids for every bottle I missed, he hates drinking plain water, so we make juice for him. He doesn't seem to really love juice, but he'll drink it from a sippy cup. So today we juiced 2.5 lbs of apples with 5 kiwis and it made almost a half-gallon of juice we also pureed 10 bananas and it made about 1.5 lbs of baby food.
Almost five months ago on January 5, 2014 I had a darling baby boy, my husband and I didn't decide on a name until we saw him, but when we first set our eyes upon him we looked at each other and simultaneously said "Charles-Winston". For clarity, his first name is Charles-Winston, no middle name and his last name is Engel.
Now, he's almost 5 months old and the nightmare of a newborn is almost over. I've heard COUNTLESS women say that their children were amazing as babies, or that their kids were so easy to take care of from day one. I'm not quite sure how true that is, but for me it simply wasn't the case. Charles-Winston was probably an average baby in most ways, he certainly wasn't spectacular or outstanding in any way medically. He woke up every 2 for the first two weeks and my husband and I were having what we'd consider some of the worst nights of our lives. The only thing that kept us going was the glimmer of a hope that we might get an extra few minutes of sleep the coming night.
One of the things that made those first few weeks extra hard was his spit-up. Anyone who's met Charles-Winston has told Benjamin and I that they've never seen a baby spit up as much as he would. If I pumped 4oz, it'd be completely out of his stomach within the first 15 minutes of eating it. Breast feeding a baby who only actually ingested MAYBE 1oz per feeding was extremely exhausting physically and mentally, my husband didn't quite understand how excruciating it was to watch hours and hours of my body's hard labor disregarded without a second thought. So we switched to formula after two weeks because my body just couldn't keep up.
Switching to formula made no difference, if anything it made his puking worse, (by the way, this whole time we'd been using full sized towels/blankets as burp rags, so puking seems to be a more adequate description) eventually we switched him to special formula for babies with issues spitting up, not like that helped either. Finally we came up with a concoction that "worked" for our little man. 6oz of distilled water, 3 scoops of formula for spit up, and 3 scoops of single grain rice cereal.
By 4 months he was displaying all the signs of being ready for "solid" food, THAT HAS MADE A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE! He seems to spit-up less in general, and hardly ever spits up bananas (his favorite).
Enough about spitting up. The first 2-2.5 months of his life were boring and pretty much sucked. It was winter in Salt Lake City, that means snow, so that ruled out pretty much ever going outside with my newborn baby. Benjamin had work, so that just left me at home, alone, and caring for a baby. I didn't know anything about babies, I didn't know that they liked to be walked around, or that they liked to be held all day every day. Benjamin and I also didn't understand how babies sleeping worked. He wasn't on a schedule and neither were we, we'd stay up late some nights, or go to bed right after dinner other nights. Charles-Winston would wake up in the middle of the night and he'd be awake for hours, from like 3am until 7am, and we'd just hold each other and be severely exhausted together.
Now, he's almost 5 months old and he's only waking up one or two times a night and Benjamin and I know a lot more about babies in general. We have a whiteboard where we keep track of everything he does, when he sleeps, for how long, when he eats, how much, what sorts of activities he and I do throughout the day. It's proven to be very useful.
At this stage in his life, I can't imagine how I could be more in love with a person, and yet every day I'm proven wrong as I fall more and more in love with him and his minute accomplishments.
