Just to give you a sense of what I'm working with here, this is a fairly standard size fridge/freezer combo around here (the jam is there for scale - we do not freeze our jam. We may stop even putting it in the fridge ...). Definitely more akin to a cute dorm fridge designed for the cooling of beer than for the storage of a week's supply of baby food, especially given that my freezer stash in NYC would have filled this freezer:
Item 2: Buying premade baby food. I spent another half hour browsing the baby food section at the supermarket. There was not a single jar under a euro, which comes out to about $1.40 given the exchange rate. Per jar. And I haven't even been to the organic store (which I just found) to price baby food there. But saying I wanted to offer the fusspot 2 different flavors at two meals per day, we're looking at $5.60 a day at the very minimum (presuming she never refuses a food, for example). Oh, and there was also not a single jar with less than 8 ingredients making the American recommendation of starting one item at a time practically impossible if I use store-bought baby food.
Item 3: The daycare will give the fusspot bottles as long as I bring them "ready to go" (i.e. no frozen bottles, no freezer bags of milk - I'm pretty sure that's standard even in the U.S.) and they will feed her whatever the other babies and toddlers are eating. On Thursday when we visited they were having peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (these sandwiches were broken into bite-sized pieces for most of the kids). In the under-two room. If you happen to be American and just gasped at such a revelation (and I should stop and note here that this daycare is the only one in my little city to receive a PERFECT score on the safety rating review least you wonder what type of shoddy/haphazard daycare I've chosen), you understand my hesitation about letting the daycare feed her too soon. I did not really press the issue yet, but I'm guessing that the teachers (who watch 10 children at a time) will not be up for microwaving frozen baby food.
Hence my recent interest in all sorts of non-frozen finger foods I can pack for the fusspot. And my commitment to repeat the mantra "They have beautiful, healthy babies here. They have beautiful, healthy babies here." Before freaking out, of course.
2 comments:
I gasped at the pb and j sandwiches, just for the record.
Yes! The fridges here are tiny! I'm cooking on Wednesday, and even though Heiko would rather shop tomorrow, I reminded him that with the need to refrigerate some items, we really should wait until day-of to give ourselves the best chances of having room for the stuff and/or leaving some stuff out on the counter for a while. Sheesh! Makes me want to complain a lot less about my kitchen at home...
And I think we may just have time for a drink when we stop through. I'll drop you an email once I know better what our precise plans are (not that we are inflexible. or that we will ever have precise plans. but I will try to at least have a general idea so that i can know that on such-and-such day we will be in "x" area...).
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