Several months ago I told you that I was making all of Jonah’s baby food myself with a Baby Brezza One-Step Baby Food Maker. I loved using the Baby Brezza so much, that I contacted them to see if there were any opportunities to work with them.  So back in September, I began writing once a month for the Baby Brezza blog.  Make sure you head over there to check out my posts!  I write mostly about being a mom to my little guy, Jonah.

Now that Jonah is over a year, he’s not eating baby food anymore. He LOVES self-feeding, and is actually the only one of my three kids who is NOT a picky eater.  He will eat about anything!  I credit this at least in part to the fact that I made him all fresh baby food in the Baby Brezza.

Since I’m not using it anymore, I passed my Baby Brezza along to a friend.  Then, another friend, Rachelle, first-time mom to now 7-month-old Conley, started asking me for some baby food making questions.  So my friends at Baby Brezza sent me another One-Step Baby Food Maker to give to Rachelle!  And I made a video for her with one of my favorite recipes and some tips to making baby-food prep easy.  Here are a few of my tips; make sure and watch my video so you can see how easy this machine is to use!

Tips for making your own baby food with the Baby Brezza:

• Although most parts of the Baby Brezza are dishwasher safe, I find it easiest to just rinse it out and dry it as soon as I’m done with it.
• Baby food-making is  most easily done if you spend an hour or two making all the food you will need for a couple of weeks. While your first batch is steaming, chop up the fruits and veggies for your second batch.  Rinse the Brezza out when one recipe is done and put your next recipe in.  ”Rinse & Repeat” until you are done for the day!
• Freeze your finished baby food in ice cube trays. Once frozen, pop them out and store them in freezer bags until you are ready to serve them.
• Most foods can be heated in the microwave.  I thawed bananas in warm water because Jonah didn’t like the taste of bananas after they were heated.

I loved using the Baby Brezza!  If I was going to have more kids, I would definitely be planning on using it again!  Hope you and Conley enjoy your Baby Brezza, Rachelle!

You can check out my latest post on the Baby Brezza blog here.

As I have whined about many, many times on this blog, I have sleeping troubles. So getting back to sleep after these wakings is difficult.  And then by the time I get back to sleep it seems he is awake again. My jaws ache from the tension I have when trying, trying, trying so hard to go to sleep.

I have left b!tchy comments on a few people’s Facebook statuses today.  I am just not myself, and I cannot let your status about your future sexcapades go without letting you know that I DON’T WANT TO KNOW.  Whether you are happily married or just whoring around, I DON’T WANT TO KNOW. MMkay?  I mean, I don’t WANT to have to “hide” you but I will.  I’m sorry if my posts about my infant’s blowout poops gross you out, but posting that you just did the nasty on your dining room table is WAY WORSE in my opinion.  But hey, if you can’t handle the poop, feel free to “hide” me as well.  We’ll just have to agree to disagree on what’s grosser.

So yeah. I need some sleep. And my kids to go back to school. And people to GET A FILTER.  Seriously, if your MOM is your FB friend, don’t be posting that!! She doesn’t want to know EITHER!

So, how’s YOUR week going??

I have gotten Jonah started early on the Vicks love!  Neither of my other babies ever got sick before they were a year old.  I gave credit for this to my fabulous breast milk immunities.  But even though Jonah’s drinking from the same fountain, if you will, he’s gotten sick a few times already – including Hand, Foot, & Mouth disease and TWO colds!  Thankfully for those colds that came with yucky coughs, I could soothe his coughing with Vicks BabyRub.  There just aren’t really any cold medications that are safe to give an infant, baby BabyRub is made specifically to soothe the cough of little ones 3 months and older. It’s non-medicated and soothes with lavendar, eucalyptus, and rosemary.  I love that familiar comforting VapoRub smell! It’s been so helpful to my little baby guy when he’s been sick.  BabyRub helps get my Vicks VapoBaby back to his cheerful self!

My VapoBaby

Isn’t he a cute little VapoBaby!  You know I’m a VapoMom!  Over the years Moms have been at the forefront of the Vicks VapoRub brand, but on this coming Tuesday, October 26th, Vicks will be announcing the first ever VapoDad!  He’s a celebrity and dad of two who a lot of you probably see on Sundays.  So stay tuned to Vicks’ Facebook page on Tuesday to find out who it is!

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I am being compensated for my role as a Vicks Blogger. Woot!

It’s fun to pull up on the end table:

(and don’t my Mommy’s floors look nice and clean?  She is trying to keep me from putting pine needles and dirt in my mouth!  Which is kind of a bummer because I love them. And also Capri Sun straw wrappers left for me by my big brother and sister. YUM!  Geez, the older I get the more I am realizing that my Mommy is kind of a buzz kill.)

I also like to pull up on the bathtub:

I like to try to pull up on Joshua’s box of cars, too!  It’s fun having big siblings, it provides you with some unique pulling-upportunities.

(And yes, I am wearing shoes with no pants.  You see, my 2nd favorite pasttime – after pulling up – is trying to roll over while Mommy changes my diaper and dresses me.  Sometimes at the end of the day, she will just give up and leave me pantsless.  Since I prefer to be pantsless, I try to give her as much trouble at diaper-changing time as I possibly can.)

But anyhoo – what I really love to pull up on is my diaper pail.  Even though it’s not that tall, it’s full of stinky diapers and the potential for tipping it over is just too tempting!

Mommy dropped a clean diaper on the floor and I got it!! I was really proud. I also wanted to know what it tasted like.

It didn’t taste very good, but it was fun watching  my Mommy run over to get it out of my mouth.  After she took the picture, of course.

Tonight, the coffee table got the best of me.  But I recovered pretty quickly.  Battle scars!! It’s all worth it!  My goal is to be walking by 10.5 months, because that’ll REALLY freak my mom out!

I’ll keep you posted on how it’s going!

“It’s probably the oatmeal,” she said.  She advised me to take out the oatmeal and sweet potatoes and then introduce them both back in after 10 days or so, one at a time, to see if there was any reaction.

On the fateful day that I re-introduced oatmeal, our House Church was having a get together at Cortney’s house.  I fed him before we left and about an hour into it, he projectile vomited all over my poor friend Jen, then all over me, like 400 times.  At first I honestly thought he had a stomach bug, because the vomiting was so similar to when  my big kids have had something like that.  But, much scarier when you have an infant.  We rushed home, with Jonah throwing up FOUR TIMES in a 10-minute drive.  Then, he threw up a couple more times at home.  All in all, about 9 times in 4 hours.  By the last few it was just bile – VERY upsetting when you see your baby throwing up that nasty stuff!

I decided to shelve oatmeal for awhile, because I thought vomiting was an odd allergic reaction and I really thought perhaps he just had a stomach bug.  So I waited about a month and tried it again.   Last week.  Just before going to the POOL.  Clearly this is evidence that I wasn’t convinced he was allergic! I gave it to him BEFORE WE LEFT FOR THE POOL.

If you haven’t noticed yet, I am kind of dumb.

Guess what happened next?  Baby boy projectile vomited (again on my poor friend JEN!!) in the POOL.  And it was A LOT.  Gross.  Sorry, people of Kettering!

He threw up again a few minutes later, so I packed the kids up and headed home.  This time, I am thoroughly convinced that oatmeal is the Devil.  For Jonah, at least.

And just in case the projectile vomiting wasn’t enough to spark my memory, Joshua made me this reminder, which now hangs on our dining room wall:

Ok, well, since there’s a sign and everything, I think I’ll just toss the oatmeal in the trash!

THIS IS MY MAD FACE!

You see, although my other kids waited until the ripe old age of eight months or so to crawl, Jonah wants to crawl NOW.  (Like how I put my Pilates mats on our hardwood floor to aid him in his ambitions? Also, please note crap under coffee table!)  And he is so close.  Every day I think, “It will be today.”  He can move around a lot and he’s getting pretty fast, but he can’t quite crawl and do it exactly how he wants to yet.  And it’s making him MAD and cranky and generally discontent.  He also doesn’t like it when I get in his face and take away whatever thing he’s reached that he shouldn’t have that his negligent siblings have left on the floor…oh, the baby proofing is giving me a serious headache!

Jonah-Jo is no longer content to be contained in his swing or exersaucer, he wants to be on the floor trying to get his crawl on at all times.  But since that often involves him fussing through the process, I’m ready for this milestone to be checked off the list!  Even if it does mean me scrambling after him more and more, I’m ok with it, if it means him fussing less and less.

I’d also be ok with hiring a nanny to supervise this milestone, but …I guess I’m just gonna hafta power through it.

And also, we’re starting Ferber again tonight so that this kid might actually SLEEP THROUGH THE NIGHT!  His sleeping has taken a real dive since this mobility thing started, and Bleary-Eyed Mommy is much less tolerant of Angry Baby than Well-Rested Mommy is.

Wow, that just gave me a great idea for a brand of dolls.

So, what milestones made your baby the most frustrated? (Not to mention you!)

So anyhoo, a couple of months ago I enlisted Cortney to help me with baby food making, since she made food for her little guys, and she had a food processor she was willing to let me borrow.  But then about 3 weeks before Jonah was going to start solid foods, I got an email from Mom Select asking if I wanted to review and throw a party for the Baby Brezza one-step baby food maker.

Heck yes I did!!

As soon as my Baby Brezza baby food  maker arrived I got busy making Jonah food.  And let me tell you, this thing is the SHIZZLE.  It steams hard foods and then blends them ALL IN ONE DEVICE!!  That’s right, one-step baby!  No more steaming foods on the stove and then transferring them to a food processor.  You just dice, add water to the steam tank, throw the fruits or veggies in, press a button, and walk away.  The Baby Brezza steams and blends the food while you get on with your life.  A-MAZING. I love, love, love it.  I have steamed everything possible that we have in the house, and gone to the grocery for more, even foods Jonah isn’t ready for yet, because it’s SO FUN!  Then, I freeze my baby food creations in ice cube trays and store them ’til Jonah’s ready to eat, at which time I heat & serve.  YAY!

So, anyhoo, to celebrate the Baby Brezza’s awesomeness, I had a little party for some friends and their babies!  The Baby Brezza and the cutting boards they sent for my party guests  were my centerpiece!

Here’s Jonah enjoying some carrots I made in the Baby Brezza while his pal Archie looks on jealously.

Gimme some of those carrots!

We had a great time at the party and it was fun for me to demonstrate to my friends how EASY and FAST the Baby Brezza makes cookin’ up your own baby food.  Because, really, people, I am just that lazy.  If I had to steam the food separately, I MIGHT just give up making  my own food. Maybe I’d stick with it regardless, I don’t know. But I do know for SURE there is no way I will buy baby food at the store now that I have my Baby Brezza!  It is saving us SO MUCH MONEY!  It costs around $100 (again, mine was free to me for reviewing and throwing the party) and since I can make 10 servings of bananas out of about 55 cents worth of bananas instead of the 50 cents plus it would cost me for ONE serving of store-bought, I know the Baby Brezza is saving us a ton.  I made 10 servings of sweet potatoes out of a sweet potato that cost me a dollar!  Woo hoo!  It is simply amazingly cheap to make your own baby food vs. buying.

I had a blast at my baby food party and I am loving making food for Jonah.  I even brought the Baby Brezza with us on vacation, and it’s working out great!  I cannot recommend this product any more enthusiastically. GETCHA ONE!!

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I received a Baby Brezza baby food maker for review and cutting boards to give away to my friends from Baby Brezza and Mom Select. All opinions on this (totally AMAZING) product are my own!

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This post is linked up to Things I Love Thursday at the Diaper Diaries!

So, with Jonah, I’m getting proactive.  I’m gonna have this kid in big-boy pants by the time he’s two!

Ok, not really. But somehow I’ve discovered that I CAN get him to poop on demand!  Well, not really demand.  But he’s sort of trained to poop when I lay him on his changing table.  Like Pavlov’s dog salivated when he heard the bell, Jonah moves his bowels when I lay him down on the changing table.  It. is. AWESOME.  And rather impressive, I must say!

Gearing up to pop out a poop!

I kid you not, if it’s diaper changing time, and he has not already pooped, I just lay him down there and within about 2 minutes he will produce a very loud, ginormous key-rap.  I first realized it after a couple times where I changed him TOO quickly and he immediately (and loudly) soiled the brand-new diaper.  And once when he pooped bare-buns on the changing table. EEEWWW.

Since he is SO very consistent with this, I have learned to take off his pants and pull his onesie way up to his shoulders because sometimes he will still shoot ‘em straight up the back even when he’s laying there!  I learned this lesson the hard way – several times.

So there ya go. I’ve got my baby poop trained.  If being trained to poop in a diaper, on a changing table, is worth anything at all…it’s at least worth a laugh!

Whenever I expressed this fear either to friends or here on the blog, everyone said that Sophie would surprise me; you all said that she would looooove the baby and be a “Little Mommy”.  Since I can barely get Sophie to glance sideways at her baby dolls, I was not really believing you all. At all.

But YOU were RIGHT.

She adores him.  She wants to burp him, snuggle him, pick him up (no), change his diaper (um, NO), and shove his paci in his face all day long, even when he is soundly asleep without it, or happily awake without it.  She tells him she loves him constantly and she is SO. Sweet.

But of course, she is a little TOO attentive, and I fear I am going to spend the next six months constantly saving Jonah from his big sister who loves him so much!  Earlier this week I changed his diaper and then left him in the pack & play to wash my hands.  I came back to find Sophie un-snapping his sleeper (4 snaps down!).  ”I’m gonna change him.” She informed me.  I then informed her that he had just been changed and that, oh by the way, only grown-ups were allowed to change his diaper!  (Although I HAVE let her “assist” with a gentle wipe after I’m already done.)  Then, the next day as I was making dinner, Jonah was again in the pack & play when Joshua came running into the kitchen and said, “Mom, this is REALLY bad…” so I pushed him out of my way (he is incapable of saying ANYTHING quickly) and ran to the pack & play.  Sophie was standing there with innocent eyes and Jonah was crying.  Joshua followed me into the room and said “She kept trying to pick him up but she couldn’t. And she kept telling me it was my turn but I knew I wasn’t supposed to so I ran in to tell you.”  (What a saint.)  So I had to give her the lecture about how only grown-ups can pick the baby up.  She cried and cried.  She was really sad about it, because she was afraid she had hurt Jonah.

But despite the near-misses, Jonah seems to love her already, too.  I caught one of his early smiles on Friday and he was looking right at Sophie as I took this picture:

Of course, two seconds later when she was trying to put his bootie on his HEAD instead of his foot, he was less enthusiastic:

And yet. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful sibling relationship! And I couldn’t be prouder of my girl for doting on her little brother!

And did you hear me? I said I was WRONG! You were RIGHT! I’m so humbled.

Yesterday was Jonah’s two-week checkup. Never mind the fact that he was 20 days old at the time, they were a bit short-staffed at ye olde pediatrician’s office over the holidays.  ANYHOO!  It was at 9 a.m. and I had to get Sophie ready for school and Jonah ready for his appointment and myself reasonably presentable (decent clothes, ponytail, no makeup) and I was nervous about it.  And I had this fear that Jonah was going to poop and pee all over the place just when it was time to leave.

But he didn’t!  All went very well. And he weighed in at a whopping 8 lbs. 14 oz.!! He was 7 lbs. 8 oz. when he was born and 7 lbs. 2 oz. at his 5 day checkup, so he gained 28 oz. in 15 days! I was stoked, and feeling rather proud of my breastmilk!

Fast-forward to a few hours later, I was getting Jonah and I ready to go to MY 3-week post-surgical check-up at the OB-GYN.  About 30 minutes before we needed to leave, I started to get Jonah ready.  Step 1 – diaper change.  I laid him down on the changing table and he made several pooping/gas passing noises so I waited a minute to make sure he was done. Then I got off his diaper which did indeed have some lovely seedy, yellow breastmilk poop in it.  I started to slide the new diaper under him but I wasn’t fast enough, because all of a sudden he let loose a torrent of poop all over the changing table.  I fumbled to wipe up the poop and get that diaper under him.

Then, he peed.  A full-force geyser whose spray reached all the way up to his little noggin.

Then, he pooped SOME MORE.  It somehow all got UNDER the diaper instead of IN it.

Then, after my mom came in to help me try and do damage control, he peed AGAIN!

So, after all this, Jonah’s clothes were totally wet, we had two formerly brand new diapers that were now dirty even though they had never gotten ON his body, and the changing table looked like it had been smeared with mustard.

And Jonah’s HAIR was soaked in pee.

And he was screaming bloody murder, and I had 15 minutes left to get him cleaned up, dressed, nursed, and out the door.

We made it to the doctor’s just on time, but then of course, we had to wait awhile in the waiting room, where a still irate Jonah showed all the pregnant ladies in the waiting room what they were in for by screaming bloody murder and refusing to nurse.

It was totally awwweeesome.

And THEN he cried all the way home.

But hey, at least my morning went well.  And I didn’t get any pee in MY hair.