Why bananas?

What does he eat?

That questions is so often posed to me.  There are things that W can eat, but for a while that list was frustratingly smaller than the list of things that he couldn't. 

With his sister, I made all of her food.  Of course I was a stay at home mom then and had a bit more time on my hands than I do now with a job and three children.  I did start out trying to make all of W's food. The inevitable problem wasn't the time involved.  Yes, it took time to prep the food, cook the food, puree the food (you get it)....To have made a whole weeks worth of food, let's say carrots, and to see that first serving come right back up, it seemed like an exercise in futility.  So I tested each new food through store bought pouches and once deemed "safe" would make it at home.

Eventually, time got the better of me and I began to buy much more store bought foods.  It was easy. Then you move past the "one ingredient" foods and it starts to get a little complicated.  "Try blueberries next," suggested our allergist, who for two months decided our next foods.  I went to the store and started looking through the choices.  Blueberries with bananas (OUT - banana allergy), Blueberries with pumpkin and Sweet Potato (OUT - Sweet potato and Pumpkin allergy), Blueberries with apples (YES?) and Purple Carrots (OUT- Carrot allergy).

It seemed like every place I looked there was a combination that included one of our allergens. The most popular base ingredients are carrots, sweet potatoes and bananas (all three on his allergy list). So back to making baby food we went.  There have been some interesting experiments and some times when our daycare teachers would balk at my attempts for variety; spinach and strawberries sounds good as a salad, but is not very pretty when you feed it to a baby.

I now have a pretty fair grasp of what we can and cannot get as far a store bought baby food goes, but there are always those time when I get excited about something new, revert back to my careless self, only to get home and realize that the pouch of blueberry oatmeal that I just bought has a unknown primary ingredient...

BANANAS!