Baby Food Question - Littleton,CO

I'm pretty sure you add the breastmilk after thawing, but I can't really remember why. wholesomebabyfood.com is a GREAT site with all kinds of info about making baby food, and they are endorsed by everybody. ;-)

I agree with Marda though--stuff like bananas and cereal you can easily mash/mix on the spot. I only mass produced and froze stuff that I cooked in big batches, like winter squash or baby dahl. :)

Like Jane though, I didn't usually mix with breastmilk--the quantity was so small that I usually just added a bit of water when I needed to thin something. My babe chugged plenty of breastmilk each day, so I didn't worry about it too much and saved some time and effort I could better spend elsewhere. If I pumped anyway (for work or whatever), I guess I would have used it more consistently though.

Also, both my babes had trouble with constipation when adding solids. Just be on the lookout since rice and bananas can both be binding. :-/

With my first I pureed different veggies/fruits and froze them in ice cube containers. Then I stored the little cubes in ziplocks in the freezer. When you need one you just get it out, thaw it, and you can mix it with breast milk then right before serving it to your son. With my second child I just made her food at the same time I made the family meal. I'd mash up things we were already eating for dinner or I'd prepare something for her at the same time as our dinner was cooking. Have fun feeding your little guy!

I've never had a great surplus of milk. So I have really perfered to mix the cerial with formula because its no big deal to toss and yes, you toss plenty.

Maybe I don't understand your question. It is so easy to mix the cereal with breast milk and to mash up a banana at the time you're feeding it I wouldn't want to mix them up ahead of time. If you smash up a banana ahead of time it'll turn brown. Even mixing cereal and breast milk ahead of time results in the rice cereal absorbing more of the milk causing the mixture to be too thick. Why is it you want to mix them ahead of time? If I knew that I might have a better idea of what you want.

I would store some of my breastmilk in those plastic snappie containers so I could thaw out a little bit of breastmilk at a time. Then I would use it throughout the day to add to the baby cereal as I needed to. I didn't make any cereal, so I would just add it to the powder and mix. As for fruits, I found that if I mashed banana ahead of time and froze, it would always turn brown. This time around I plan on just mashing it at each feeding. I never reused any of the food when I did it this way because there wasn't enough to save.

Whenever I tried mixing cereal ahead of time just so it could be ready, it kind of looked gross. Even just having extra to feed a little later. It really only takes a minute to mix it at the time of feeding and looks much more appetizing. For some reason the cereal gets a little grayish after it sits for some time and bananas turn brown after a while. I would use breastmilk since I pumped at work and just warm up the milk in a cup of hot water, then add pureed bananas or pears (which I would sometimes freeze and then derost in the fridge the night before).

It's best not to try to save and re-heat baby food at all, bacteria from teh baby's mouth will quickly multiply in the food and the saliva will start to digest teh food, it is pretty yucky to think about! Remember that for a small baby a tablespoon or two or three is all that s/he is going to eat in one sitting. So if you want to freeze your baby food before hand one great way to do it is by putting it in an ice cube tray, then when it is frozen hard transfer the cubes to a freezer bag. One cube per feeding will be more than enough. Or you can also freeze the food in a freezer bag laid flat, then break off small chunks of ti as needed to thaw and feed. In this manner I think it would be fine to freeze somehting with breastmilk already mixed in.