Blueberry

As I mentioned I have had a lot of fun making purees for Declan to eat. I know some people are big fans of the "baby led weaning" where you just give them small solid pieces of food and let them figure it out, but for me that would take the joy out of mashing things beyond recognition. I made blueberry puree the other evening. I cooked the blueberries in water just very briefly. For each puree I try to cook the produce as little as possible so as to retain as much of the nutritional value as I can. I could have probably just pureed the berries right out of the fridge but I wanted them to be smooth so I essentially boiled them for about a minute and a half. I put them in the blender and had a nice liquid. Because of the liquid nature of the berries I opted to mix them with oatmeal cereal to make them a little thicker. This worked out nicely and very shortly I had 5 small containers of very purple puree. I had some left over pear puree in the fridge so I mixed a little of that in for sweetness. This meal definitely has the most potential for mess out of what I have made so far (apples, pears, broccoli, sweet potato, green beans and carrots) but Declan has been a fairly neat eater so far. He rarely tries to grab the spoon although he has taken to biting it lately. Yesterday after work I fed him the blueberries for the first time and it was a mildly disastrous. He was tired yesterday evening and started to rub his face during "dinner". This resulted in blueberry cereal all over his face and in his eye causing him to rub even more. I had to stop feeding and wipe him down twice before he finished to keep the stuff out of his eyes! He finally finished and we took our regular evening walk in which he proceeded to nap for half an hour. In the end though he seemed to really enjoy the blueberries even if he didn't realize that the antioxidants in them were not something to be received topically. I'm hoping to catch a nice photo of him with his blueberry mustache sometime this week.

When I initially decided to make for food him I was reluctant to go the route of making my own "full dinner" purees with meat but now I am tempted to try it. I'll let you all know how that goes. With so many good pre-packaged options on the store shelves there is plenty of back up for me if I find it to be too difficult.