What a Plant-based Baby Eats in a Day
I think this might be the last time I can call Jamie a baby as he has just turned one. It has been the longest and shortest year of my life - global pandemic, multiple lockdowns, bad sleeping, juggling a baby and home schooling - 2020 am I right?!
We started food with Jamie just after he turned six months old. We’ve roughly followed the Baby Led Weaning approach like we did with Jensen. Kids and food can quickly turn into a stressful situation, worrying if they are eating enough, and enough of the right kinds of foods. I’ve personally found the baby led weaning approach really takes the stress out of the situation. The philosophy they follow is that babies and children naturally know how much food they need. It favours skipping pureed, mashed food and letting babies feed themselves with bigger chunks of food. This also helps develop their fine motor skills. I’m still breastfeeding and this also takes some of the pressure off as I know he’ll get the nutrition he needs if he has a day where he doesn’t eat that well.
I didn’t think Jensen was a picky eater until Jamie started eating, he eats everything! He’s also messier than Jensen and loves throwing snacks to the dogs when I’m not looking. We offer breakfast, lunch and dinner, and he has breastmilk between meals and before bed - and lets be honest sometimes multiple times during night! His appetite is pretty consistent even when he’s teething or sick which is quite different to Jensen. Some of his favourite foods are grapes, blueberries, avocado, rice, potato, mushrooms, and mandarins.
5.30am: Breast milk
Woke for some milk and then went back to sleep (and had also been up three times in the night to nurse with sore teeth, yawn!).
8:00am: Breast milk
He was up for the day around 7am but didn’t have his first drink until 8am, he was far too busy playing.
8.30am: Breakfast
-Baby rice crackers with cashew butter, frozen blueberries, & nut/seed milk.
Breakfast was a bit rushed and chaotic trying to get Jensen ready, his lunch made and out the door on time. Jamie wasn’t too interested in the crackers and gave most to the dogs but had two helpings of frozen blueberries. He also drunk about 30mls of his nut/seed milk.
The milk recipe is taken from Dr. Joel Fuhrman’s book Disease-Proof Your Child. It recommends supplementing with a blended nut/seed milk around one year of age. This is not to replace breastmilk but to supplement it with extra nutrition. I make a batch every three to four days from water, oats, sunflower seeds, walnuts, and dates. Walnuts are a great source of omega-3 fats and sunflower seeds are full of polyunsaturated fats. They both also include a wide range of vitamins and minerals including Vitamin E, selenium, fibre, folate and iron. He really seems to enjoy it and usually has at least a full bottle over the course of a day.
Dr. Fuhrman favours having a diet of excellence to encourage a strong immune system in kids. This is an alternative to the spiral of getting sick, being prescribed antibiotics and then being more susceptible to getting sick again. We’ve followed his advice for Jensen and although he has been sick (his first winter at daycare was awful), he has managed to avoid antibiotics. As a side note we’re not against antibiotics at all, they are an amazing medicine but have been over prescribed and are supposed to be used for life and death situations. Thankfully we’ve never been in that position with either of our kids.
10.30am: Breast milk before his morning nap
1.30pm Lunch
-Snack box of raw fruit & veggies, homemade date & walnut bread with avocado, and nut/seed milk.
I try to be organised and prep a snack box with a variety of fruit and veggies for Jamie to have at lunch and dinner. It’s also great to give him while I’m busy getting the rest of the meal ready so he can play with it and keep busy! Today he had green beans, mandarins, cucumber, and pear.
Lots of lunch was shared with the dogs but he did eat some of all the fruit and veggies. He enjoys cucumber when he’s teething and had a good gnaw on them. He had about a third of his bread and avocado and was obviously very thirsty after his big nap and finished his milk which was about 100mls.
I also gave him some of my lentil sprouts which he actually enjoyed!
3.30pm: Breast milk
We were out walking the dogs after school pickup and Jamie was quite grumpy. I realised I hadn’t fed him milk since before his nap, so we stopped under a tree for a quick drink.
5.15pm: Breast milk
Our dog walk turned into an epic adventure and Jamie fell asleep on the way home. He woke up grumpy so I fed him some more milk so he’d be a bit happier. This also gave a chance to get dinner sorted.
5.40pm: Dinner
-Snack box of raw fruit & veggies, left over taco mix made from jackfruit & mushrooms, quinoa pasta, and nut/seed milk.
Jamie wasn’t too interested in his fruit and veggies at dinner time. He ate some mandarin but the dogs got the rest. He hadn’t had pasta for a couple of weeks and really enjoyed it, eating all of it and a few mouthfuls of the jackfruit taco mix. He also had about 40mls of nut/seed milk.
We’ve started feeding him more of what we eat at dinner time, but were having leftover pizza so had to make him his own meal. We had the taco mix left over from a couple of nights ago so heated some of that up for him. He was finished before us so I also gave him a small sippy cup of water to play with while we finished. He drank a little but enjoyed blowing bubbles and spilling it all over himself more!
7.30pm: Breast Milk before bed
Jamie doesn’t usually nurse to sleep but always has milk before bed. It’s a nice quiet wind down time for both of us. If we have a good night he’ll wake once but usually it’s 2-3 times during the night for more milk. It’s become the new normal for us and I just try to remember that this too will pass!
And that’s a wrap of what a plant-based baby eats in a day! Jamie is very easy with food since he enjoys almost everything. We just try to offer him as much variety as possible. Getting the sometimes picky five year old to eat is much harder!
