Making Your Own Baby Food

Posted on May 2, 2013 by macduff617

When I was pregnant, and still wondering what kind of child we’d have, one of the things I most worried about was whether or not we’d have a picky eater on our hands. Picky eaters are, in my book, the worst. I get that olives are an acquired taste, and that some people think that cilantro tastes like dish soap, but the people who complain about textures or say things like “I can’t stand soup” make me need to just, well, have a moment. I was very nervous that our daughter wouldn’t be able to stand soup.

There are tons of blogs out there that will tell you how to do all of this, but we found Tyler Florence’s book Start Fresh to be very helpful. He makes a very good point: try a taste of your kid’s baby food and see if you like it. If you wouldn’t eat it, don’t make your child eat it. It helps your child develop his or her taste buds so that hopefully you won’t have to play airplane to get them to eat.

I have friends whose babies do the Baby Led Weaning route, which rocks, but our daughter really likes purees so I don’t try to force her. We’ve had success with the following recipes, so I’m posting them.

The morning smoothie. Dear lord, our kid loves her smoothies. We use a Magic Bullet to make them quickly each morning using a banana, frozen berries, and almond milk. She eats about half a cup each morning. I eat the dates and peanut butter.

Roasted bananas, yams, and apples. I put these into the oven together and then puree them. If you look at the labels for all the trendy baby foods out there, apples are usually the #1 ingredient. Our daughter loves them, too.

I mixed the apples and bananas with brown rice (I’ve also used farro, which she loves) and froze it in small serving sizes. It’s easy to pull it out of the freezer, add a tablespoon of water to one serving, and microwave it for 15 seconds to get it to the point where she can eat it. This combo is great for lunches and it’s not as sweet as you’d imagine it to be.

Probably her favorite thing (and mine, too) is this broccoli-potato puree. It’s so FREAKING good. We ate this, I won’t lie.

Our daughter is very adventurous, which makes me think that it’s only a matter of time before she’s eating anything and everything. We’ve really enjoyed making her food, and I would recommend it to anyone. It’s so easy and it’s much more rewarding to feed your child something that you’ve made yourself rather than something you’ve squirted out of a tube. Although we still do plenty of that, believe me.

New Obsession: Grasshopper

Posted on March 26, 2013 by macduff617

Kathryn Budig in Grasshopper

I avoid some arm balances because they feel uncomfortable: the shin bone on the tricep, or a tight IT band ripping into your elbow. Grasshopper, or Revolved Flying Pigeon, always made me scratch my head a little, though. I couldn’t figure out how to get the foot to connect with the tricep. A Kathryn Budig class on YogaGlo got me starting to work it, but I think I missed the placement of my back hand, mistaking it for side crow and sticking it back too far on the mat. The results were somewhat laughable, and definitely humbling. It’s nice to learn something new, especially because you know you’re going to crush it in the near future.

I spent some time reading Kathryn’s Challenge Pose article on yogajournal.com and am starting to work it through in my mind before trying to get my body into it. There’s so much to it: the core work, the preparatory twisting, being able to connect the foot to arm and maintain that balance and connection…without falling on your face…

A potentially helpful video for those who don’t enjoy reading (or who don’t get past the whole Bieber Fever bit)…

What I am Watching Today

Posted on March 21, 2013 by macduff617

(for the fourth time, essentially)

This is hugely meaningful for me because I’ve been dealing with a lot of feelings of vulnerability, although not so much with myself as with my daughter. There are moments when I am just astounded by my love for her, my desire for her well being and success. It’s something I haven’t experienced with anyone or anything else, and it opens up a whole host of anxieties. Will she have lots of friends? Will she go to a good college? Will she fall in love with someone worthy of her love?

These thoughts can keep me up at night, just as much as her suffering through a cold can. And something that Brene Brown, genius that she is, said makes the bell ding in my head and brings me back to center. She says:

“And we perfect, most dangerously, our children. Let me tell you what we think about children. They’re hardwired for struggle when they get here. And when you hold those perfect little babies in your hand, our job is not to say, “Look at her, she’s perfect. My job is just to keep her perfect — make sure she makes the tennis team by fifth grade and Yale by seventh grade.” That’s not our job. Our job is to look and say, “You know what? You’re imperfect, and you’re wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging.” That’s our job. Show me a generation of kids raised like that, and we’ll end the problems I think that we see today.”

Running After Losing Your Running Partner

Posted on March 10, 2013 by macduff617

When our dog died, a big part of me decided that I was done running. That had always been something I did with my little mutt in tow, and the painful realization that she was gone was just too much for me. It was (and hey – still is) hard enough to walk in the door without her there to greet me. I open up the fridge and expect her to come in, drowsy from a nap, to see what the snack is. And on days like today, when it’s lovely and sunny out, I miss her nose out the car window like I’ve never missed anything or anyone before in my life.

Taking a much deserved nap at Heavenly Lake after doing a decent chunk of the Presidential Traverse. Dixie’s on the far left.

So running seemed like it was out of the question. Our life Post Dixie was definitely different than the life we had with her. We stopped going on our nightly walks together, and I can’t even tell you the last time I went past the neighborhood dog park. Running just seemed like one more thing that would be a previous chapter and not go any further.

Somewhere along the line I started to want to get back out there. As the weather started to warm up, I started to want to take my daughter out for more than a walk around the block. She is already an incredibly adventurous spirit and I knew she would love to be outside running. I found a cheap, decent jogging stroller on Craigslist and drove out to Cape St. Clair to buy it off a woman who was clearly a hoarder. Standing there in her driveway looking at it, I thought “Do I really need this in my life?”

“Go ahead, run down the block and give it a shot,” she told me. So I took it out on the road and started running down the street with it. I hadn’t gotten to the next house before I knew it was coming home with me. One wheel wobbled and it tracked stubbornly to the right, but there was just something about pushing it down the street that made me feel so happy and at home.

Yes, there is a baby sleeping in there…

As soon as I got home, I put the baby in it and bundled her up and took off running around the neighborhood. I consciously went the exact opposite direction as our walks with the dog so I wouldn’t be thinking about her, but of course she still hit me like a brick in the face. The more I ran, the more I mentally relived every run she and I ever went on. All the parks, all the neighborhoods, all the miles logged either training for a race or just out to stretch our legs. Maybe I never had a conversation with that dog, maybe she never picked me up from the airport or went out for drinks with me. But she was my best friend for a very long time. The body remembers those relationships more strongly than it remembers others.

I got home after a couple of quick miles and found a baby sleeping soundly in her little chariot. I brought her dead weight into the house and snuggled up on the couch with her. And I was elated. Part of what I think I discredited when I decided to give up running was the proverbial runner’s high. That surge of magical endorphins running through me made me realize what I’d forgotten when I threw in the towel. I remembered why Dixie always loved running – we got to spend quality time together, then we’d have that same happiness floating between us when we got back (and usually shared a huge snack). She would pass out immediately upon getting home just like my girl was doing now. And the next day she’d be ready to do it all over again.

I still miss her more than anything I can coherently put together in a sentence. I miss her fuzzy ears, her wet nose, and the sound of her paws on hardwood floors. But I realize that on all those runs, she was giving me something incredible. The fact that I had a dog who wanted to run with me is something I’ll always have in my heart. But now there’s another girl in my life who wants to spend that time with me. She’ll run with me, first in a stroller and then maybe later on a bike, then maybe one day she’ll run next to me. If she ends up with her father’s legs, she’ll soon be running far ahead of me like Dixie always did. And when I’m gone, she’ll have to find someone or something else to share that time with her.

Until then, though, I can just be so grateful for the air in our lungs and the pavement beneath our feet. Dixie’s time on earth was way, way too short. But I know in my heart that it was well spent.

Finding Happiness

Posted on March 4, 2013 by macduff617

A few months ago I made the conscious decision to take the Facebook application off my iPhone. And I realized how often I have to fight off boredom: standing in the check out line at the grocery store, before bed, even when sitting at a particularly long red light. I did it particularly because I wanted to be more present for my daughter, but I quickly realized there was a lot more to it. Being present is not an easy thing. It’s often very uncomfortable.

Then a few weeks later my teacher shared this article with me and I came to realize that there is basic math behind it. You can’t be happy with the present moment until you are understanding and accepting of the present moment. It’s tough, and it’s a challenge, but the benefits manifest almost immediately. My daughter realizes she has all of my attention and literally blooms right in front of me. It’s at these moments that I’m so much more grateful of the breath in my lungs, the people in my life.

The Monkey Mind often disguises itself as the ability to multitask, or a quick wit. But it’s also a very cunning way to build walls up around our own happiness. Matt Killingsworth’s TED talk helps to take the blinders off our eyes to see how willingly we work to bring ourselves down. There’s so much to be grateful for, if we just take the time to notice it.

Mayurasana: Peacock Pose

Posted on February 18, 2013 by macduff617

I’m a card carrying member of the Arm Balance Army. I love ‘em. Even when I was 9 months pregnant I was doing bakasana and bhujapidasana. But one pose has always looked like an impossible joke to me: mayurasana, or peacock pose.

Mayurasana is essentially salabhasana (locust pose) with a pedestal. The whole body is aligned from the crown of the head to the toes. The core engages and the body knits itself together, balancing on the triceps which are parallel to the mat. We never practice it in class. We didn’t even practice it in my teacher training. It’s not that it’s too hard. It’s, well, too intense.

I went to a Noah Maze workshop a while back and spent a weekend re-learning the Warrior sequence, bending my back, restoring everything, and finally getting deeper into arm balances. I knew mayurasana was coming because I’ve taken his Yogaglo classes for months now and he includes it in one of the more challenging quick classes (which is sometimes all I have time for now). Noah’s mayurasana is a thing of beauty. He makes it look so effortless that you would think there were a bunch of middle school-aged girls kneeling around him, whispering “light as a feather, stiff as a board!”

My first attempt at mayurasana wasn’t noteworthy. During my second, I ended up on my mat crying that I had punctured my spleen. But during the third, Noah cued something new. He said to think of “sliding” forward. After a morning full of shoulder openers, I recognized the cue and started pulling forward with my collar bones. Bringing the mental focus away from the elbows-on-ribs to the top of the body–that is, the eyes, the crown of the head, and the shoulders–changed the way I was getting into the pose and let me move in a new direction. My whole body knit together and my toes lifted off the ground.

My mayurasana still needs some work. I’m not as planked-out as I would like to be, and my toes aren’t pointed (something I’m not accustomed to doing in yoga, so it’s a lesson). And I need to pull my shoulder blades down my back, lifting my head and shoulders further away from the floor. This comes back to salabhasana, which is what you have to put in your head to get the body off the mat. But it’s nice to have a starting point. Somehow my body has gotten used to the pose because whereas I was first so sore that I thought I must have bruised a rib, now I’m able to slip mayurasana into my daily practice without noticing it later. It’s a really fun pose and builds incredible strength, both physical and mental.