Time to Eat!

Up until now, I have been feeding Eric in his bumbo chair.  It is especially great for eating outside of the house because it's so lightweight that it's easy to bring places.  At home it also works really well for keeping Eric seated while I feed him.  Unfortunately, though, I didn't buy a bumbo seat with a tray, and I don't think it's worth buying a tray separately anymore since I think it is very possible that Eric will outgrow it soon.  As Eric gets older, it's important to try to start giving him finger foods to try to feed himself.  Without a tray, though, it is very difficult to sucessfully pull that off.

So, I figured that despite Mauri's aversion to having baby paraphernalia all over the house, that it was time for a high chair. Mauri's brother has been offering to let us use their old high chair for awhile, so I told Mauri to tell him to bring it to us.  So, this past weekend, he brought it over, and I spent most of the day Monday cleaning it and fixing it up a little because it had a few rips in the plastic seat cover, and I wanted to fix it as best as I could to prevent it from breaking more.

Eric has been having a little bit of separation anxiety letely, and it is difficult for me to get things done without him being upset about it.  I can usually get by, though, by having him play on the floor nearby where I am working.  So, in these pictures you can see that Eric was on the kitchen floor playing by me while I was working on making him some food.

Green bean and zuchini purees

Sweet potato puree in silicone muffin liners

I like to make a lot of different foods for him, and as I may have written before, I puree the foods, and freeze them into individual servings to make things easier for me during the week.  Here, a lot of people do make their own baby food, I think, because there aren't that many varieties of baby food available in the supermarkets.  Those that are available just don't seem that appealing to me.  Even if they did, I like knowing exactly what Eric is eating.  I can buy organic vegetables, when I can find them, and can also use free range chicken.  Even better, I'm starting to have organic vegetables available from my own garden.  His food can't get any fresher than that!
Up until now, he's been eating a fruit mix in the morning, and a meat, like chicken or fish (from Mauri's boat) or beef, mixed with vegetables for lunch.

At first, I used ice cube trays for freezing the foods, but the regular trays aren't very durable.  I then found silicone trays, which were much more durable and easier to use, but they are a bit small for Eric's servings now.  Since then I've found something larger and easy to use: silicone muffin liners.  So, I tend to use the silicone ice cube trays for certain veges, and use the liners for the main meat and vegetable puree.  Whatever molds I use, I fill them up, cover them in plastic wrap, to keep ice crystals from forming, and I stick them into the freezer.  As you can see, my freezer is pretty much filled with all of Eric's food.  

When I'm ready to prepare Eric's lunch, for example, I choose a couple of vegetables and a meat, and all I have to do is heat them up.  With fruits, I often mix them up fresh in the morning, but I do make some batches of frozen for when I have to feed Eric outside of the house, and to use up fruit before it goes bad.  They are easy to use, too, because I just need to let them defrost.

Knowing that so many people make their own food here, I was surprised to find that most people don't freeze portions of food for their babies.  I guess they either make it daily or just puree some of their own food for their babies.
When I went to my friend's nursery school to visit and feed Eric in the company of other small kids, they freaked out when they found out that the fruit puree that I was feeding him had been frozen.
"Doesn't it turn brown in the freezer?"
Actually, no, in fact even the avocado stays very green.  If you don't cover it well, a very thin top layer turns brown, but otherwise the color keeps perfectly.
"Aren't you losing all of the vitamins in the freezer?"
Hmmm, I don't think so nor do I know why that would happen.  Most places that tell you how to make  and store baby food suggest freezing little batches, so it's not like I'm doing anything out of the ordinary.  Of course, they already found it very strange that I feed my baby avocadoes, if you may recall.

What else does Eric like to eat?
He loves yogurt, which I often give him as dessert, or I give him a little mixed in with his breakfast fruit.  It's hard to find yogurt made with whole milk that doesn't have artificial flavors nor added sugar, so I make him yogurt myself. It's actually much better and cheaper than store bought yogurt, too, and I've recently found a brand that sells organic milk.  It's actually very easy to make, and I end up making large batches weekly.  He loves the yogurt plain, and will eat it after not wanting to eat other foods.

Over the last couple of weeks, the weather has been very strange.  Up until Eric's party a week ago, the weather was very cool and I was still dressing Eric in long sleeves often.  Since that weekend, though, it has been very hot, and we have had weather more typical of July or August.  So, I've been wanting to use our little above ground pool.  Without a heater, though, the water is much too cold for Eric.    Mauri told me that even if I could find a heater for it, that the cost of heating a pool here, with the high cost of electricity, would prevent it from being worthwhile.
So, I decided to take the matter into my own hands and look for a solution online, and I actually found some very good ideas for solar heating of pools.  One of the ideas is very simple, and rather ingenious.  You take the water from the pool, and pump it through many meters of black hose or tubing, and have it go right back into the pool.  The sun heats up the black tubing, which absorbs a lot of heat because of its color, and in doing so, heats up the water.

I got Mauri to help me look for what I'd need to pull it all off.  We already had some black tubing, left over from our garden irrigation system, and we also had our old smaller pump from an older inflatable pool that we used to have.  We did need a few parts, to connect the thinner tubing to the wider tubing of the pump, along with more meters of tubing, and bought them this weekend.  Mauri helped me put a spiral of 50 meters of tubing together, connecting it to our old pump, and our improvised heater seems to work relatively well.
I wanted to try it out right away this week, but on Monday the weather turned cloudy again.  So, when the sun showed up again this afternoon, I was excited to get it going to try to start warming up the pool.  I tried it out, and it was working very well.  At first the water that was coming out of the tubing was so hot that I could barely touch it.  I left it going for awhile, and came back to check on it too see if it would keep warming the water once the water cooled down the tubing a little.  It wasn't as hot as before, but was still much warmer than the water in the pool. 
Somehow, I must not have put the hose back into the pool the same way as before because when I went back in the evening, to turn off the pump once the sun had gone away, I realized that the tubing had fallen out of the pool.  I was actually emptying the pool, and all of my warm water was headed for the lawn.  Oh well, tomorrow I'll have to start from scratch, and have to fill up the pool a little more, and start warming it again.  Luckily it wasn't running for very long, and the tubing has a relatively small diameter, because I still have a lot of water in the pool.  I have learned my lesson, and next time I will tie it in place! 
Tomorrow, I hope to find a solar cover for the pool, to keep the water warm at night so I'm not heating it up for nothing.

I'll leave you with a picture of my orchid in bloom because it was one of the plants that was given to me in the hospital when Eric was born.  Eight months later it has decided to bloom again.

Saving the best for last, I have a short video for you to see. Eric lately has been all over the place.  He's starting to be able to really scoot around on the floor, and is starting to get into a lot of things.  When I try to keep him from getting into things he shouldn't be playing with, he gets very angry with me.  So, when I ask him to give me a kiss, sometimes he just screams at me.  Other times, though, he actually does it, and it is very sweet.  So, one day, when he was very generous with his kisses, I set up my camera to record one of them.  I hope you enjoy it. I did. :)