This Is How I MomSolving the puzzle of motherhood one piece at a time

This week, Munchkin Meals is focusing on breakfast. In a perfect world, Logan (8 months) would eat everything on my plate. In the real world, he gets his own meals and is somewhat less interested in them. He eats – which I’m thankful for! I’ve heard of some babies that have NO interest in solids – but after a few bites of everything he tends to get disinterested. In an effort to counter this, I try to make his plate colorful and flavorful. I usually offer a vegetable, a fruit and a carb for breakfast. Dinner focuses more on proteins, though sometimes we have yogurt for breakfast (mostly when I’ve found a food he absolutely doesn’t want to eat… yogurt always works).

In this picture, Logan is having ww bread with philadelphia, tomatoes, cucumbers and grapes. He’s also holding a book, because having toys to play with keeps him interested in his food for longer. Funny how that goes.

He’s surprisingly fond of tomatoes, I think it must be the color. Next grocery haul, I’ll grab some peppers and perhaps some other more colorful stuff.

In this one, we – again – have toast with philadelphia, cheerios and microwaved apples with cinnamon. This was after a disastrous experience with peas and I was at the point where I kind of just wanted him to eat something; I’d given up on vegetables for that day.

Waffles, eggs, broccoli, mangoes, nectarines, peaches, plums, yogurt and cream of wheat are some other breakfast favorites at our place!

This seemed like fun, and since Logan’s been eating stuff that’s starting to qualify as interesting, here we go! For reference, he’s 8 months as of July 1st. This fun project is hosted by Brittany at A Healthy Slice of Life, who has a little munchkin that’s a month older than Logan.

Logan’s breakfast entailed mozzarella/cheddar cheese, cut-up cherries and broccoli florets. He was pretty enthusiastic about it at first, but he didn’t get into the cheese much. It’s a work in progress. I offer it up about twice a week.

Just to prove I definitely don’t make up his initial enthusiasm :

Lunch is usually something simple – he gets cheerios and other finger snack food, and he also had about half a pouch of this:

He loves basically all flavors of Plum Organics. They, and baby yogurt are my go-to things when he doesn’t seem in the mood for table food. He ALWAYS eats a ton of the pouches, and yogurt is probably his favorite food, ever.

We ended up going to a 4th of July event in Bellevue for a few hours and had some Red Mango frozen yogurt there. Logan ate about half my mango and strawberry toppings, but I didn’t remember to take a picture of it. I’m really quite new at this food blogging thing.

We tried something new for dinner – a turkey meatball, blueberries and finger food. It was his first time eating meatball (the husband and I had them too) and his second time eating blueberries.

He’s pretty picky about what berries he likes. He loves any and all of them in purees, but as for raw berries… he flat out denies raspberries, and this is what I’ve dubbed his blueberry face…:

That said, he does eat blueberries, and I think it’s just an initial hurdle. I’m pretty blessed that – so far – he isn’t a picky eater. *knock on wood* He’s a lot more likely yo go after finger food than the real food I offer up, but he always at least feeds himself a few bites of everything. Sometimes I hit the jackpot and find something he loves, in which case he eats the whole plate.

Happy belated July 4th – it was a beautiful end to the day over here.

My husband and I have completely different tastes. Since I lost a good 70lbs about 6 years ago, I’ve been eating pretty healthy. I like veggies, poultry and whole grains while my hubby prefers carbs, sausage and cheese. I used to cook separately for both of us and I didn’t really mind… I had the spare time and cooking is my hobby, so it seemed like a win-win situation. However, I want my child to learn good eating habits and I also want to start taking meals together.

Right now, things still are kind of a-jumble. My husband sleeps from 8am-4pm, so his eating rhythm is completely different from mine. Yet again, I find myself cooking separately for both of us.

Logan is starting to become very interested in food, so I make sure to always let him watch me eat when he’s awake. He hasn’t grabbed food yet, but I think within a month or two he’ll be ready to start slowly on solids. My plan is to introduce one type of food per week and have him get a taste of oatmeal cereal, bananas, avocados, sweet potato and squash by the time he’s 6 months old. Then we’ll branch out to all the fun stuff.

That also means that by the time he’s 6 months old, I want to have at least one family meal that we can all eat together at the table. Hopefully, my husband’s and my sleep schedule will be aligned by then, so I don’t totally throw him off by having his dinner prepared when he wakes up. I guess there are worse things, but I know my digestive system would revolt.

I might start looking into some “his and her” recipes, so instead of preparing two completely different meals, I can just make some changes to adjust his part of dinner to his liking. I think it might preserve my sanity.

Any tips on how to make having a meal together as a new family easier?

I started my pregnancy at 125 pounds.. which is slightly more than my happy weight (120), but a certainly acceptable weight range. I ended my pregnancy at around 180 pounds… which is a much, much less acceptable weight range and definitely nowhere near my happy weight. In fact, that’s almost as much as I weighed back in my teens, when I decided I’d had enough of being chubby.

I dropped quite a bit in the first two post-partum weeks. The first time I weighed myself at 4 weeks PP I was down to 157 pounds. Now, at 9 weeks PP, I am down to 149 pounds and I’m going pretty reliably at 1 pound a week. However, this is not the ‘effortless’ weight loss I had envisioned. I am eating around 1200-1400 calories a day and I get a lot of exercise due to the little bean and his needs. This is pretty hard work. The only upside is that the weeks pass by pretty quickly and usually I have little time to eat anyway, so the weight loss seems decently fast.

Another plus is that my body weight is distributed totally different than how it was when I was at my high weight in my teens. I don’t look like a blob, I actually have a pretty good shape.. with a few extra pounds for my liking. It’s pretty hard to believe that I do weigh almost 150 pounds – if I ventured a guess, I would’ve said I’m between 130-140. Which is a great thing! It might mean I could feel pretty good about myself when I’m *actually* between 130 and 140. At current speed, that should take me until about… March. But with this cute little bundle, March is only a blink of an eye away.

I can’t wait to see how much he’ll have grown and changed by March!

On another note, the little guy is getting his 2-month shots tomorrow. I’m keeping the tylenol ready… but I’m scared. He’s such a peaceful, happy, inquisitive little guy.. I hate to see him unhappy and in pain.

21 weeks, 3 days

I have an almost insatiable hankering for cherries every summer as it is – delicious, ever so expensive morsels! This is multiplied by about… ten since I’ve been pregnant, and FINALLY cherry season has rolled around. I’ve been eating pounds and pounds of lovely red crunchy fruit and don’t plan on stopping until it becomes unaffordable again. $7/lb, really?! $3-4 is already a luxury, albeit one that I’ll gladly splurge on while I still can.

There are so many delicious cherry recipes out there, but my favorite is to just devour them fresh out of the bag. Rinsed, of course. They share the same fate as many other fruits this summer; I seem to not be able to get enough of sweet, juicy fruit. Blueberries, bananas, melon, pineapple, apples, nectarines – and, of course, the lovely cherries. I see this as a step up from the chocolate cravings that I’m usually plagued with.

It seems all I want these days is fruit, potatoes, whole wheat pumpkin spice bread from Great Harvest, protein pancakes, eggs, fish and poultry. This is such a HUGE turn-around from the first trimester, where fast food and simple carbs were my constant companions.

I feel that I’m doing a lot better on weight management this month (although I refuse to weigh myself between doctor appointments), to the point where I eat plenty of nourishing foods for my baby, exercise and still enjoy my body – more or less.

On the downside, our only car – a Ford Focus 2003 – has recently started its well-known ignition problem, where we’re unable to turn the key without manhandling it with a hammer. Since at any point it could refuse to turn on entirely, we’ve decided not to make trips that require us to get out of the car unless we’re at home. So instead of frequent gym trips, we’re now limited to “food hauls”. Tomorrow we’ll call up a locksmith and hopefully he can fix the issue.

Baby boy has been incredibly active! A few days ago my husband felt him move for the first time, and it was a darn big kick that he gave his daddy! Such a precious moment. I’m glad that he finally gets to experience what I’ve been telling him about for a month. Fetal movement is amazing; it’s making the pregnancy seem all the more real. No matter how many aches my body will go through in the next 19 weeks, baby boy makes it all worth it.

20 weeks, 7 days

For many expectant moms, weight gain is one of the things souring the experience of creating new life. I am one of them. To give a little backstory, I was always overweight as a child and teenager. My parents didn’t have a good grip on handling rewards without giving me treats, and I was home alone for upwards of 6 hours every day after I turned 10 years old. Loneliness as well as accessibility to junk food did their thing and I piled on an excess of about 50 pounds.

Around 20 years of age, I had had enough of being teased and ridiculed about my weight, and made the decision to drop the weight once and for all – with great success. I hit my target weight and ended my weight loss at around a BMI of 19-20. That is my happy weight. 115-120lbs is where I feel my most attractive and energetic and it’s easy to maintain with regular exercise and healthy eating. I had changed my lifestyle for the better and felt good about myself for the first time in my life, and I kept it up for 5 years now.

However, when I fell pregnant, my plans got boycotted. In my first trimester, I more or less lived on simple carbs – bread, potatoes, pasta, pastries and fruit were more or less all that did not make me nauseous and my routine of veggies, whole grains and lean protein got greatly interrupted. I didn’t lose my appetite – in fact; I was hungry a LOT of the time – but the things I was hungry for were things that frustrated me.

Of course, I wasn’t about to let my baby or myself go unnourished, so I ate fruit whenever I could, took my prenatals and made to as best as I could with whatever else I could keep down… but the weight went up. After the first 12 weeks, I had packed on about 5 pounds. After another month, I had packed on another ten. Yes, I somehow managed to gain about 10 pounds in a month! And this was past the first trimester, where I had actually started eating a lot better.

My midwife wasn’t happy with me, and I myself was rather devastated. I knew it wasn’t -quite- as much as 10lbs since I got weighed with boots, before a bowel movement and after drinking a liter of water, but it was still terrifying to see the number.

Thankfully, at the weigh-in a month afterwards, I had only gained 3 pounds (strangely enough, since I went on a 2-week vacation that month and wasn’t watching what I ate at all) and am now hoping to keep up a steady weight gain. I’ve shed most of my bad eating habits and have converted back to whole grains, vegetables, fruit and lean protein – just quite a bit more of it than I was previously eating. I also still visit the gym every second day.

I obviously know that pregnancy is about my baby and giving him the best start to life he can possibly have, so I put my own childish issues aside as best as I can. Regardless, weight gain is hard. This new body of mine scares me when I look in the mirror, and I yearn for my previously slim, non-swollen figure, with which it was so easy to do every day things like running, going up the stairs, cleaning the house, or even just turning around at night.

I aim to revert to my old exercise regime as soon as my doctor ok’s it post-partum. Hopefully I won’t have any issues breastfeeding my bundle of joy, so he gets the best nutrients for his growing body and I get to have a headstart at reverting to my old happy weight (the knockers can stay, though).

20 weeks, 3 days

As mentioned, my little man is tiny compared to other boys his age range (20 weeks in-utero) and weighs in at a mere 10 ounces, thus putting him in the 5th percentile. The doctors didn’t seem too concerned considering my size (5’3″ and skinny, at least pre-pregnancy), but they did advise me to eat more protein and mentioned the possibility of another ultrasound checkup in about 6 weeks. Since then, we’ve acquired a high-end blender and multiple sacks of protein powder, as well as turkey sausages and many gallons of milk.

I’m a carbohydrate kinda girl and while I’m not a vegetarian, I rarely feel like eating meat. There are just so many other delicious things to eat out there! While I thought I was doing decently in the protein department, it certainly can’t hurt to ramp up my intake until my boy has caught up in growth – or perhaps even until his birth. This isn’t the time to care about my own personal food preferences; this is the time to ensure that a new person gets the best possible start to life that he can.

So now, I have a protein shake for breakfast, yogurt for lunch, and some kind of meat, beans or eggs for dinner followed by another protein shake. My snacks are made up almost entirely of fruit. Little one has been extremely active over the past few days, so I’m crossing my fingers that it’s working, or that he’s at least having a growth spurt. Hopefully we can get him up to a more average weight by birth (though I most certainly would be terrified of giving birth to a 95th percentile chunker baby! I don’t even think that would realistically fit…)

As I’ve found out, my high-protein diet greatly reduces the fiber I’ve been putting into my body, so I’m going to have to improvise on that one, perhaps with more vegetables or even a fiber supplement. High-protein diets make for very uncomfortable poops, I’ll tell you that much. Makes one wonder how the athletes do it.