Ideas for Transportable Meals for Crawlers/9 Months

My son loved the little salad size macaroni pasta - babies don't care if pasta is served cold - I just tossed it with a little olive oil to keep it from drying out. You can make a batch and divide it into little zippy bags or those 4 oz. Glad food storage containers.
You can cut up watermelon or mild cheddar cheese in tiny 1/3inch cubes. I highly reccommend the Glad containers - they're cheap enough you won't be upset if the sitter ruins one and they're lightweight and dishwasher safe. I use the little ones for salad dressing or ketchup in Hubby's lunch too.

A typical lunch (+2 snacks) bag for my son: yogurt, applesauce, sliced cheese and crackers, cut up fruit (either bananas, grapes, peaches, plums, mango, or other soft fruit), lunch entree (either rice and beans, lentils, pasta in sauce, quiche, well cut up chicken and veggies, creamed soup in sippy cup).

I try to make each snack or meal balanced with a carb, fat, and protein. I pack it in an insulated lunch box and the school puts it right in the fridge. Many of the entrees are left over dinner from the night before or come from trader joe's (frozen quiche, biryani, chicken fried rice). Don't be afraid to try different things but always provide familiar safe food as a back up.

Use empty baby food jars to pack other food in. Other foods--cheese cubes, applesauce, refried beans, mashed avocado, eggs (scrambled or hardboiled & mashed up). If she has teeth, don't get too crazy mashing & blending--she's got to learn to chew, too! (My mom ran a family day care when I was a kid, & I can remember an 18-month old coming to us who had only had baby food, 'cause it was easy--and he did not know how to chew because he'd never had to!)
My little girl loved to taste anything we were eating that I thought she wouldn't choke on--she was most uninterested in the jar stuff, & we never did baby cereal.

Hard boiled or scrambled egg yolk (you can do whole eggs after age 1 if there’s no allergy issues.) My daughter loved hers with a little chopped frozen spinach cooked into it. Spinach is also a great source of iron. For packing, Gerber makes some great little plastic bowels. They come in a four pack (one each pink, blue, green and lavender) and each has a clear lid so you can see what’s in it. I got mine at target for 4 or 5 dollars. I also used glass canning jars. The ones made for jelly are the perfect size for smaller portions.

I would recommend investing in a Beaba Baby food maker. I know it's quite expensive, but I love mine and so do my friends who I recommended it to. It only take about 45 minutes prep time/handling time to make meals for the whole week. If you're feeding her baby food from the jars sometimes right now, save the jars. Then with the Beaba, you can make all kinds of fruit, veggie, even meats, and blend them to a consistency you want and store them in the jars to use during the week. I know that you can buy other food makers and do the same thing, but the beauty of the Beaba is that its really really simple to use and clean up. There's a video on the william-sonoma website that shows how to use it, and you can buy it at Lullabye Lane too.

hope this helps...

I agree with Joyce regarding make ahead and freeze. Then use whatever type of container you have to send the food in. If your daycare has the facilities to do so, and you are comfortable with it, you might even send a weeks' supply of several items for them to choose from on a daily basis so you aren't doing the daily packing.
As for the equipment to prepare the food, a food processor, or blender work just fine... no need to buy any special equipment. As the children in my care were able to chew more, I started using my food chopper (Pampered Chef - of course!) to make coarser food, and that worked fine. In our childcare, I prefer to provide most of the food myself. We would just talk about what their children were ready for and most of the time I prepared it. Once in a while a mom would bring something from home, because she had it ready but otherwise I found it easier to just make it here. The children are all now eating regular table food, so the only problem I have is getting it onto their plates fast enough!

Hi A.
I made my own baby food on my days off. I used a food processor. I would steam or cook whatever I wanted to feed the baby and then I would make a lot then process it in the processor to how think I wanted it to be. then I'd put them in little ice cub trays about a 2 table spoons each and stick the whole ice cub tray in a zip lock bag and freeze them. You can also do this during dinner time when you make dinner and gradually build up your baby food. I would thraw whatever babyfood I was going to use the next day in the frig. As for dinning out. I used little plastic containers or the jar and ask for a bowl of hot water and warm it up in that. At home, I'd use the microwave. I hope this helps. You don't need to buy a baby food processor, a regular processor does the trick. It is even better. I bought different ones and liked my regular food processor much better in the end. Hope this helps.

When my daughter was around that age, she loved "real" food so I used to cut up her dinner in tiny pieces. For instance, if we had chicken, rice and steamed peas/carrots, I would be sure to cut up the chicken and carrots (the rice and peas would be soft enough for her to mash around in her mouth). I specifically saved leftovers (which usually was more than enough for her) for her lunch at daycare the next day. I just placed it in a small tupperware dish the night before (so I can just grab it and go in the morning). I also included "desert" which was usually a banana, fruit bowls, tiny pieces of cut-up apple or strawberries, yogurt, etc. (Of course as she got older, the pieces got somewhat bigger)

Hi Amanda
Congratulations on your baby. The Super Baby Food cookbook has some good ideas, as well as Le Petit Appetit and Baby Bistro. Can you make a batch of something and use that for the week? I got in the habit of making a batch of healthy pancakes, freezing them, and just taking them out on a need to eat basis. They can easily be defrosted in the toaster.
Good luck ,I know it's tough
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I have one quick and easy tip. I would take frozen peas, mixed veggies, and small fruit like frozen blueberries and put then in some sort of plastic container with a lid. (A friend saved her Gerber containers from the baby food she used and those worked amazing!) You can either defrost them overnight in the fridge in their container and then pack the next morning. Or sometimes just throwing them in the lunch box in the morning, they are more than ready come mealtime.

How about small pieces of cut up or grated cheese, small pieces of cut up turkey deli meat, boiled and shredded chicken, small pieces of cooked carrots, peas, green beans, red pepper (i use a frozen mix), small pieces of cut up soft pear or apple, blueberries, pirate's booty and veggie booty for snacks, frozen waffles. Good luck.