Don’t get me wrong. I am a lover of tools and the amazing inventions we enjoy today make our lives better, safer, fuller, and more wonderful. I am not interested in forgoing modernity in favor of a Spartan, sterile, or otherwise difficult existence. However, where does a new family begin to sort out the true needs from the money, time, and storage sucking items marketed to us? I am aiming to address one tiny category in this blog post: baby food gadgets.

By all means, you should follow the direction of your pediatrician in regards to what to feed your baby in the manner they direct. One of the many reasons I love my pediatrician is because I’d bet he’s a Wildflower at heart too. Every time I have asked, “Should I buy…?” his answer has been “No.” He’s old fashioned in that way and I love it.

If you are reading this, regardless of if you are currently agonizing about how to feed a small child or not, you are likely aware of the vast number of gadgets out there designed to transform food that once was solid to a puree-type thickness. This food is for the time between when a baby is eating only liquids to when they have enough teeth to chew grownup types of food. This time frame can be for a few a couple months up to a year at most, depending on when the baby in question gets their teeth. In a very general and conservative guesstimate, many doctors say you can start feeding baby food to a baby at six months of age and then you could expect many teeth to be present by one year. Some babies can’t or won’t eat food till they are one and surely lots don’t get teeth till after one but I would bet that most moms would agree that they are truly in baby food land for only 6 months.

It is important to remember that not only is a parent making a sort of solid food into less solid food for not very many months but also that baby is still getting lots of calories daily from milk or formula. So not every meal needs to include baby food. In terms of time spent in a particular stage consider this: Baby is in diapers (and you are dealing with and thinking about diapers) every day for about 2 years. You are in the bathtub daily for a long time. You are either nursing or making formula many times a day for a year or more. Baby food by comparison takes up a LOT LESS time and importance in the grand scale.

But if you search on the internet, “baby must haves” or stroll the baby aisle of any big box store, there are countless gadgets for making baby food that are aggressively marketed to new moms. There are hand and motorized blenders, mashers, feeders, tiny containers, and the like. You may have a friend who has one or more of the gadgets and they may love them and I think that’s great. I am here to say you DO NOT NEED those gadgets and you would likely be very glad you didn’t spend the money on them or the time purchasing, cleaning and storing them and then figuring out what to do with them when you are no longer in baby food land.

The baby blenders are my favorite to criticize and here’s why. They are just a small blender. That’s it. They don’t make the ingredients more wholesome, more age appropriate, or more palatable to baby than a regular blender. They cost more than a regular sized blender of a similar quality, and are a total racket. It’s not like when you are done blending pears into puree you can give your kid brother the baby blender with the teddy bear on it to make margaritas in his first college apartment. There’s no where near enough room for blended drinks! The market for used baby gear is of course an option but the fact remains that families could easily have blended in a regular blender or food processor or used a fork or potato masher to soften food for baby. By skipping buying the tiny blender you save the time of figuring out where to store it or get rid of it when your days of pureed peas are over.

One item marketed to new moms is baby food cookbooks. I will admit that it was very handy to have a reference for when it is a good idea to introduce certain foods to reduce allergic reactions, and nice to have a reminder that these baby foods shouldn’t hang out in the fridge for weeks before being served, but the cooking instructions in these books are all the same. Steam or boil harder foods and blend/mash using an expensive device and for soft foods, soften further with an expensive device. Sorry for the spoiler but that’s about all the cooking instructions are going to give an eager new mom. The only verb you will find is some variant of ‘mash’.

The tiny containers are seemingly useful but again I argue their use is very limited and the time for which they are useful is very brief indeed. I used a couple of gifted tiny containers to freeze the nice sweet potato I prepared for baby and dutifully filled the awkwardly tiny receptacle and froze them only to find that baby hated the sweet potato and despite periodically defrosting and trying again, it was wasted effort. Sure, you can freeze baby’s favorite mashed treat but my feeling is that you are likely cooking or at least in the kitchen anyway- why not mash up what you are eating or mash up something fresh?

So how did I mash up food for my babies? I mashed with a fork, I sliced into tiny pieces with a steak knife, and I used a small food processor that I already owned that I use for lots of non-baby related tasks. I never felt compelled to use the grownup blender I already owned. I would say that if a family owned one motorized, grownup appropriate device such as a food processor or regular blender or even a hand or stand mixer, that would suffice. Truly, a person could mash almost everything with a fork and knife, hence the graphics at the top of this post that I chose very purposefully.

What do you think, Wildflowers? Share your thoughts in the comment section below!

Cloth Diapering Part 2: The Gritty Details

The very same concerns come up every time I talk to people about cloth diapering and I will try to address them here. Cloth diapers are not dirty, they are easy to use when out and about, and they are not more time consuming than disposables.

Cloth diapers are a very clean choice for many reasons. The brand of diapers I use is gdiapers and I LOVE them and highly recommend them but there are other great companies out there that are certainly excellent also. Gdiapers sell a product that helped take the yuck factor out of poopy diapers. The cloth liner is a product not unlike a stiff piece of toilet paper that fits right on top of the cloth. After baby poops, Mom can lift the stiff paper-y cloth liner out and plop the poop into the toilet (where poop belongs!). In the event that you don’t have a liner when baby poops, it is not a big deal. Read: It is NOT a big deal! Lots of times, the poop can be plopped into the toilet, or I just swish them in the toilet and then put them in the diaper pail.

Cloth diapers are washed in a washing machine using the hottest water setting (which kills germs, last time I checked), using the longest cycle and soap that is appropriate for cloth diapers (agitation and soap removes the “stuff” from the cloth). I separate the white cloth and white gpouch (an elasticized liner that keeps the absorbent cloth close to baby’s skin) and put it into the diaper pail. The colored and oh-so-cute outside part (called gpants in this brand’s system) gets velcroed shut and tossed in my regular laundry. That has kept the colors brighter and velcro and elastic lasting strong through two children.

I use Rockin’ Green soap because it is plant-based and comes in a formula for hard water, which I have. It isn’t any more expensive than Tide or other petroleum-based soap and I have found it to work very well.

I use a Bambino Mio brand diaper pail and that particular diaper pail has a lock which has been handy for keeping toddlers at bay. Because I wash diapers every day or every other day, my house doesn’t smell like diapers. I assure you, I have some bloodhound women in my family and they’d let me know if my home was smelly.

As for time, consider first the time one would spend going to the store, the aisle, and the checkout line to buy disposable diapers. Then consider the time one would spend to take the now very full trash bag out, to the curb, and the money spent to pay to get rid of the garbage. All that is time that has to be considered first. Now consider that as a new parent, your laundry needs have increased significantly. Babies dirty onesies at a terrific pace, and as a new mom I know I rarely went a whole day with the same outfit on because I’d spill or leak something terrible on my shirt. All this means is that new parents do more loads of wash. I found it to be of no inconvenience to throw one more load a day in the machine. I’d bet dumping the diaper pail into the washing machine takes under a minute. I chose to hang my cloth diapers on the line to dry because I really like saving money, I like my washline, and with my first baby, my dryer didn’t work well. That doesn’t take much time either and then I guess the only other time consuming part is making a stack of the diapers and putting them pack in the changing station.

As for going out and about with baby, my wet cloth diapers go in a wet bag that is likely designed to put wet swimsuits in. When I get home from my outing I put the wet contents in the diaper pail along with the wet bag and that’s it.

As for wipes, I use cloth wipes because of all the reasons I chose to use cloth diapers. Also, they are so small (washcloth sized) that they don’t create more laundry- they don’t make an additional load of wash, they just increase the size of the load by a little bit. I do use the gdiaper brand plant based wipes for when I am out where there isn’t a faucet nearby. Because I have saved a lot of money by using cloth diapers, I don’t feel like it is frivolous to buy slightly more expensive biodegradable wipes that are made with what I refer to as, “plants and fairy dust.”

Speaking of plants and fairy dust, gdiapers makes a biodegradable insert to use instead of the cloth. The idea is that you can have the cute, colored outside part and inside you have an absorbent part made of plant matter (and said fairy dust) and you can compost, flush, or toss and it will decompose in a landfill in 50 days. This was one selling point of the gdiaper brand that I felt comforted by. If ever I was behind on laundry or on a trip (to an imaginary place where there are no washers and dryers) I could and would use the disposable inserts. I actually use them when on a long car ride or overnight sometimes because my babies have been very big (more potty) and deep, long sleepers (also more potty) and the disposable inserts are a little bit more absorbent in those situations.

My cloth diaper “test” was when my first born was 4 months old and I had to jump in the car and spend several days away from home, sans husband, to be with an aunt who was very ill. I had no time to plan and hardly time to pack but I grabbed my wet bag, a stack of cloth diapers and a package of the disposables. I was in and out of the hospital visiting for several days and I never even opened the pack of disposables because at the end of the day I just used my cousin’s washing machine. After that trip I was convinced that they’d work in any situation. I wish I could find the blog post I read when I was first reading about using cloth. A couple used them successfully on a yacht, sailing around the world. After reading that, I was completely on board.

As a mom who values time, money, and quality I have been so, so happy I chose to use cloth diapers. I know as an expectant mother the last thing you want to do is make the wrong choice. I truly would say that any new mom should try them. I’d love to hear from a mom who used cloth and did NOT have a washer and dryer in the home. I know there’s a frugal wildflower out there who’s done it- let me know how you made it work!