Homemade Baby Food: The Savings

Let me preface this by saying that I am no SuperMom! I am simply a mom who tries to help our family save money where possible and practical. For us, this means shopping the consignment racks for some of Levi's clothes, using cloth diapers, accepting gently used hand-me-downs, and most recently making homemade baby food. Are you a terrible mom if you buy your kids full-price name brand clothes, use disposable diapers, and feed him or her food from a jar? By all means, no! You might in fact be the most attentive, loving, generous, servant-hearted mother in all the world!

It just comes down to a matter of means. And since we're currently working our way through seminary, we don't have a ton of extra cash floatin' around. Hence, the homemade baby food.

We also tried baby led weaning (BLW) in the past and really liked that a lot! The principles of allowing Levi to have larger pieces of food to munch on and simultaneously help to develop his fine motor skills was really intriguing. However, once he got to the point where milk and whatever small amounts of solids he was eating from BLW was not enough, we decided to introduce purees. He was around 8 months old at that time. I found a lot more ease of mind in knowing, "okay, he ate 2 oz of this and 1 oz of that, so he should be full" rather than always questioning if he was satisfied. We still do give him finger foods after most every meal and for a mid-afternoon snack, so he can "practice" and learn what food actually looks like in its non-pureed form.

Let me just throw out there the fact that I had never made homemade baby food before to this extent. Back when Levi first started eating solids, I made a small batch of purees for him in addition to BLW. Because he was eating so little at the time, it took very little work and very few ingredients. Now that he is an eating machine, this takes a bit more effort and a lot more ingredients--but I have found it to be worth it (unless we happen to find a great sale on jarred food).

On an average day, Levi will eat 2 oz of a veggie-based puree and 2 oz of a fruit-based puree for both lunch and dinner, so all my calculations are based on those figures. He eats oatmeal for breakfast, so luckily I didn't have to make any purees for that meal. I'm a very quantitative person--I like to do the math and figure out what is going to be the most economical option in the long run. So I crunched some numbers (not that it was very difficult) and here were my results:

2 - 4 oz of Earth's Best baby food @ $1.00 per jar x 60 days = approximately $120
8 oz of homemade baby food x 60 days = $57 total in groceries (this will vary based on the recipes you make, but I feel like any ingredients for stage 2 or stage 3 recipes will be fairly close to this total)
Total savings = $63 or $31.50/month

Now to some, that may not seem like a huge savings. But to us, it seemed worth it to at least give homemade baby food a try. I mean, I love to cook to begin with, so I was excited to contribute to my family in this way. So, I planned his little menu and went grocery shopping and set aside a full day to pureeing-madness...

Check out the recipes now... {part 2}