Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Baby Food

So most of you already know that I am making my own baby food. No, I'm not trying to be Super Mr. Mom. I'm not against anyone who buys their food off the shelf or anything like that. We simply thought that since one of us was going to be home all of the time that it might just be more economical and maybe even a little bit fun to come up with our own little concoctions.

As it turns out it is quite a bit more economical. A few days ago I saw a mother and grandmother buying several (at least 30 jars) of baby food for their two month old little boy. These jars were 39 cents each. Let's see... $0.39 @ 30 jars....that equals $11.70 + tax. Now that's really not a whole lot of money. But let's say for grins that little bubba eats on average two jars a day. That's $23.40 a month. Now don't forget, little bubba is a growing boy. He's gonna want more pretty soon. That really starts to add up. Let's say for the first year he eat's an average of 3 jars a day.....That turns out to be $427.05 per year + tax on jarred baby food.

Now I'm not totally sure how much I spend on food. I know that a bag of frozen green beans cost me $0.87 x 2 bags = 1.74 Those two bags of green beans after they are cooked and blended I figure equal about 40 ounces of food. That turns out to be about $0.04 per ounce. The $0.39 cent jars are 2.5 ounces which is $0.16 per ounce. For those of you who aren't that good at math......the jarred baby food is 4 times more expensive than the homemade.

Now here is my question. For all the people who are fortunate enough to have a parent who stays home with the child. (This might be a bit more difficult if both parents worked full time jobs.) Why on earth would you NOT make your own babyfood? It's unbelievably easy to do so. It is way cheaper, and you get to grind up all kinds of food in the blender. How much more fun could a guy ask for?

I decided to post this today, because yesterday (Halloween) we knew that we would be out all day with Oda Mae and we were not too sure how the homemade icecube foods would hold up. So we stopped by a local market and picked up some jarred green beans, carrots, and peaches. All foods that Oda Mae eats already. To my surprise, these "baby" foods were really soupy. No wonder little two month old bubba was able to eat it because he could surely just suck it down from his bottle. And why anyone would just want to feed this stuff to their child, I will never know....My peaches smell like peaches! These things did not smell like peaches. The jarred stuff smelled awful!! The carrots did smell okay though.

My point....in a pinch, jarred babyfood is just fine. For the millions of parents who simply do not have the time to make their own. That's really too bad. I'm really glad that I can give Oda Mae something that I can easily make myself.

Tonight we're going to try Chicken!!!!!!


MMmmmmm...."Tastes like chicken!"


-OD

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Could she tell the differance? (the word rolls off your tongue with an "aw" quality to it, as in the words awning, sconce, monster, ponder, the Fonz...) ~gm~

(the word verification is getting fatter and fatter. I think it might need to go on a diet...)

Anonymous said...

Hmmmm, not sure. You'll have to ask Oda Momma if she noticed any difference.

-OD