Feeding Essentials

Time really flies. It seemed like I just gave birth some time ago and now my baby has started eating semi-solids. I was a bit hesitant to do it as she's only 5 months old, but the doctor said she was quite ready and it will likely help with her spit-up problem (or 'lungad' in Tagalog) since she's much more likely to absorb the semi-solids better than her milk.

And so we bought/brought out the essentials to begin our feeding adventure:

1. Bumbo chair - We left our bumbo chair in Manila and so had to buy a used one via craigslist for SGD20. Still much cheaper than the SGD70-80 retail price for a new one. We didn't buy a feeding chair as we already have a booster chair on hand for when she grew older and could sit on a chair without needing support. We also felt the bumbo was much better at helping her sit properly.

Andi in her yellow bumbo chair

2. Plastic bowl and spoon - We bought a plain plastic set from Pigeon as she'll only have one semi-solid meal for the first few weeks and bought a set of plastic bowls and spoons from Munchkin for when she's older and will have solid meals 3x a day.

Andi's Pigeon feeding set. The space on the left allows you
to mash food and then transfer on the main bowl (here shown
with pureed broccoli, yum!)

3. Philips Steamer/Blender - This is hands down the best investment you can make if you plan to give homemade food to your baby. We bought ours at a baby fair more than 2 years ago when we had our first baby and we plan on using it now for our second one. It's so convenient because you don't need to use different machines. Just steam food first, flip the container and then blend. So easy. In fact, we only gave bottled baby food a handful of times to our first born and that was when we would go out and needed something convenient and easy to prepare.

Our 2 year old Philips steamer blender with Philips VIA storage cups

4. Philips VIA storage system - We bought these to store homemade food in the freezer.

5. Bibs - Thankfully we had tons of bibs left over from having our firstborn and all of these were gifts from family and friends. If there's one thing I didn't buy which we had tons of, it was bibs. However, what we had were cloth ones and for the early weaning stage and even much later, it's much more convenient to use plastic bibs.