Back in the day, as recommended by a bazillion baby rearing books on the planet, most parents chose white rice cereal for their baby’s first solid food. Then the great white out debate began, not to mention arsenic scares in rice, and baby advocates started telling parents to start Baby off with healthier fare, like brown rice cereals, brown rice mash or vegetable purée. Now, it’s a whole new game, as brand new research says you should consider starting your baby off on solids with healthy finger foods. Researchers on the study compared a group of spoon-fed babies to a group of self-led weaning babies. What they found is that babies who are allowed to self-wean and who are then introduced to solids by feeding themselves versus having a parent spoon feed them, were able to better master skills related to self-food regulation. In turn self-food regulation is directly connected to health benefits for life such as a lower BMI and a preference for healthy foods like carbohydrates.

Trekkie parents, dinnertime just got out of this world! Get geeky with this Stark Trek Enterprise Feeding system. A space ship spoon with LED lights will get your little explorer interested in Operation: Peas and Carrots! The set is BPA and phthalate free – and a lot of fun.

 

Ethical fashionista Stella McCartney counts four in her veg brood. Bethany Frankel recently announced that her toddler daughter is a vegetarian. And anyone could have guessed that Alicia Silverstone, who blogged throughout her pregnancy on vegan health issues would pass her commitment to vegan living on to her son. Yet these announcements were all met with a combination of curiosity, support, disdain, and outright criticism. Which is something any of us non-celebrities who are raising veg kids can relate to. I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 10, and I have eaten a primarily vegan diet since I was 24. So I never considered that I would raise my children as anything other than vegetarian. My son is in good company: a 2010 Vegetarian Resource Group Poll reported that 3% of kids in the U.S. are vegetarian. But is raising vegetarian or vegan kids a no-brainer? I spoke to several vegan and vegetarian parents, read on to discover their theories and challenges behind how they feed their children.

Last week we reported on a California dad who decided that he was going on a diet consisting strictly of his wife “Katie’s” frozen surplus of breast milk. The couple had accumulated a 22-cubic-foot freezer full of milk that they weren’t able to donate to breast milk banks. But instead of throwing it out, they decided Dad would drink all of it and they’d blog about the experience. The experiment, which kicked off less than a week ago, has (to no one’s surprise) come to an end. But it’s demise is not for reasons you may think. The man, known as “Curtis,” didn’t give up because he couldn’t stomach anymore breast milk, but rather because of all the internet hype, he and Katie were able to connect with a West Coast mom desperately seeking donor milk for her quadruplets.