by: Emma Aguirre
We still have a sick baby on our hands. Thankfully, my mom is coming in from California tomorrow for the weekend. We’ll get at least a night at the movies, which I’m looking forward to, as it’s been a long week in the Aguirre household. I’m afraid my daughter and I are going to bounce this cold between us. She’s been a trooper though and, for the most part, her routine isn’t too disrupted. I wish I could make it go away.
I’m just not hearing an improvement in my daughter’s cough and while it’s only really been two full days on the medicine, I can’t help but wonder if it’s something more than a cold. She has a lot of mucus coming out of her nose – I think I finally mastered the blue bulb syringe thing – and I got some children’s Vicks to rub on her chest. And feet, so I hear! Oddly enough, and it may be an old wives tale, but both my mom and my mother in law suggested rubbing it on her feet at then putting socks on. She can grab her feet and enjoys sucking on them it seems, so I was reluctant but did it anyways. Pretty sure it can’t hurt! P.S. you can only use baby Vicks on babies older than three months. I think I’ll be calling the pedi again if it continues through the weekend.
Since she’s been ill, I’ve only been giving her the rice cereal, and have avoided the fruits. She’s already got some bowel issues because of the medication, so I don’t want to mess with anything else. She was quite fussy this weekend before we cottoned on that she was sick, and I still managed to give her some peach which she seemed to enjoy more than the banana. But she was still fussy afterwards, and my mother in law suggested that she may have a tummy ache from the peach not being ripe enough. Interesting point I thought, which could put a dampener on my homemade baby food plan. It had crossed my mind at the Mom Expo in the Woodlands last week Friday. I got a pamphlet highlighting the cleanest fruits and vegetables – so those low in pesticides – but also the dirtiest. The “Clean 15” according to baby food maker Happy Baby includes onions, avocado, sweet corn, pineapple, mangoes, sweet peas, eggplant and sweet potato. Included in the “Dirty Dozen” are celery, peaches, strawberries, bell peppers, spinach and grapes. The company suggests buying the dirtiest offenders organic. Obviously, cleaning them well is a must too whether organic bought or not.
I had begun researching cook books about making my own food and one of the moms at TMC’s mom and baby yoga suggested Annabel Karmel, a British best selling cookbook author specializing in children’s nutrition. She’s sold more than three million copies of her 19 books, so I think she knows her stuff! Her website is www.annabelkarmel.com, where she shares some of her puree recipes. I haven’t bought anything yet, but I plan to check her out in the bookstore to see if she says anything about clean produce, how to find it, and when to use it. When a peach is soft, it’s ready to eat, but for a baby, is it ripe enough? Should I keep all fruits in the fridge? This is where the packaged foods have a definite benefit. I got a free sample of the Happy Baby food, which I was excited about, and I checked the back this evening. It only has two kinds of pear, organic lemon juice and vitamin C in it. While I’m not sure what other brands have in its baby food, I like that there are just a couple of ingredients I can pronounce in it. Either way, I plan to hold off until my daughter is feeling better and will continue researching until then. Another tip I picked up at the Expo is to check the label of children’s vitamins. The first ingredient is usually sugar and it’s worthwhile looking for organic or all natural varieties of those too.
