Apr 4, 2017

So this afternoon I took the kids to the library. It’s been a long time since we’ve been and the weather was gorgeous and perfect out today, which somehow made the experience all the more charming. Anyway, I’m as bad at navigating the library as I am good at starting a fire with flint and steel, so when I went in search of day hike books for Bryan about hiking trails through Shenandoah National Park, I ended up in the cookbook section. This is what happens when I very cooly say to the librarian on the way in, “Could you just point me in the direction of this kind of book?” and they tell me the number and where it is and ask, “Got that?” and I say, “Yes, thanks!” and then wander off in completely the wrong direction. 

The good news is, I happened upon a gem of a baby food cookbook that I actually sat down and read a bunch of already, which if you know me at all is kind of a big deal. In fact, just this afternoon my sister-in-law was expressing her feelings about my being able to write as well as I do while reading so little. It’s not that I don’t like reading, it’s just that there are a lot of books in this world that I don’t care about at all and a lot of non-reading activities that I enjoy more.

But back to this baby food book. When I was scanning the baby food cookbooks on the shelf at the library I recognized a couple that I had checked out years ago when my oldest was a baby. I almost pulled them out just for familiarity’s sake, but then thought better of it and realized that if I never did anything with them seven years ago I wasn’t likely to actually use them now either. So instead I picked out the prettiest books, which is sometimes a terrible tactic, but in this case proved very effective. At least in terms of happening upon a book I’m enjoying looking at.

The book is called, “The Amazing Make-Ahead Baby Food Book: Make 3 Months of Homemade Purees in 3 Hours.” The more I read it, the more it seems like exactly the kind of baby food cookbook I would write if I knew anything about making baby food. It’s simple and detailed and set up to be efficient and flexible. And you do most of the work in a relatively short amount of time which is kind of my jam. (I mean I guess that’s anyone’s jam, but I’m calling it like shotgun and claiming it anyway.) It also seems to call for a lot less of the random specific kitchen items you’d only use for cooking baby food, stores the pre-made food in a more compact way, and, in those ways, it sounds a lot more cost-effective to me than some of the other homemade baby food stuff I’ve looked into.

That being said, it’s all fine and good to read a book and think something sounds great, but it’s a whole other thing to actually do it. I tend to be a little compulsive when it comes to random stuff like this, so I’d feel a lot better about it if I could just buy the few things and start now, but, of course, I won’t even need any baby food for like nine months at least. There is zero hurry here, which is great in terms of having time to research and think things through (ughhh), but terrible for an attention span like mine. At this rate I could be completely over the whole idea of making homemade baby food by the time baby #3 is even born. I know because I’ve been similarly excited and then totally uninterested about plenty of other things like this in the past.

But. On the other hand, we have an extra freezer now and it’s pretty awesome and, while we should probably restock or actually start eating all that beef and barley soup sometime soon, we haven’t yet gotten tired of having meals all cooked and ready to go when we want them. So having a bunch of baby food all prepped and ready to go ahead of time could end up being a for reals cool thing.

Anyway, it’s late and I’m rambling now. But the point is, you should all be impressed that I kind of read part of a book today, even if it’s cancelled out by your being totally unimpressed by my library skills.