We love food in our house. LOVE it. However, since coming back from our holiday to France (and eating ALL the food France had to offer) we’ve been on a bit of a healthy eating mission. It’s really easy as a busy mum to get stuck into the rut of cooking the same meals every week, so I know the key to us all having a healthy diet is planning ahead and looking for a variety of different foods to get excited about.
SMA® Nutrition’s Come & Wean with Us™ campaign is proving very helpful in my hunt for new recipes to try – and not just for the baby! There are lots of weaning recipe ideas on the website for every stage of weaning. At nearly a year old Baby Girl is well on the way with her weaning journey, so we’re trying out the stage three Turkey and Pepper burgers from celeb mum Sheree Murphy.
They’re a great choice because it means I can make a batch for the whole family rather than faffing about with different meals for all of us. They suit the healthy eating bandwagon that me and the husband are currently on, and they’re bound to be devoured by my little pair of meat lovers.
Baby Girl has always loved to feed herself and eating together as a family is an important part of our daily routine. I have to let my inner Monica go as much of what she eats often ends up on the floor, but I know that exploration and play are key parts of her adventure with food, as she finds out about new tastes and flavours.
Little baby-sized turkey burgers are great because she can easily feed them to herself. What’s more, they’re packed with protein – a vital ingredient in a weaning baby’s diet and (I’m told) the possible key to that all-elusive sleeping through the night conundrum.
I’m going to be trying these out over the next week and recording how we get on with the making and eating of them. I’m planning to serve Baby Girl and Frog’s portions with pasta and salad, while the NLM and I will have ours with sweet potato wedges and salad. Yum.
One of the things I’ve found hardest about weaning is trusting that Baby Girl is having enough food. The fact she’s never been a great sleeper has sometimes thrown me – often people will assume she hasn’t eaten enough in the day and that’s why she’s waking at night. I don’t think that’s always the case, but it can be hard to know if she’s getting the right amount of nutrients, especially when she’s feeding herself.
I read a really interesting tip about weaning when I was starting to wean Frog four and a half years ago. I really didn’t want to make a “thing” out of food, and I know that it’s important to be relaxed and trust that your children know when they’re full. So the “food is just for fun until they’re one” mantra helped me avoid those panics about how much she was eating, as I knew that her milk feeds would supplement the other food she was having.
Baby Girl is still breastfed, but if she wasn’t then I would have introduced around a pint of something like the SMA Follow-on Milk a day, to make sure she was getting some of those hard to get nutrients like Iron and Vitamin D. Continuing milk feeds can help keep weaning a relaxed and fun affair. It also helps to remember that some days my baby will be hungrier than others, so not to try to pressure her into “clearing her plate” if she doesn’t seem to want it.
If you’re looking for weaning advice and recipe inspiration yourself, I thoroughly recommend checking out the SMA Nutrition website. And perhaps you’d like to add the Turkey and Pepper burgers to your meal plan for next week, in a kind of blogging cook-along?!
**
Thanks to SMA Nutrition for working with me on this post. For more information about how I work with brands check out my Work With Me page.
Follow
Leave a Reply