Perhaps you’ve already read our new book, The Eco-nomical Baby Guide: Down-to-Earth Ways for Parents to Save Money and the Planet.   Maybe you’ve discovered the homemade baby food recipes included in the book and have spend hours whirling up delicious concoctions.  With minimal effort you’ve saved money, packaging, and carbon emissions by preparing healthy purees for your little one.  Now you deserve some brownies!

Steal a few frozen cubes of whirled up nutrition and slip them into this yummy recipe!  I’ve tried this on family and friends always with great results.  No one realizes that these are healthier than your standard brownie because the coffee and cocoa make them just as decadent.

Baby Food Brownies

Ingredients

• 1/4 Cup melted butter or margarine
• 2/3  Cup baking cocoa
• 1/2  Cup whole wheat flour
• 1/4 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/2  Cup sugar
• 1/4 Cup brown sugar
• 2/3 cup baby food puree (pumpkin, sweet potato, squash, or yam)
• 1 egg
• 1 1/2 tsp vanilla
• 1/4 tsp instant coffee powder

Directions

Melt butter and cool. Then simply mix all ingredients together thoroughly. Spread mixture into a greased eight inch square pan.  Bake in a 350 degree oven for about 20 minutes or until brownies are slightly firm.  Enjoy!

One lucky reader is going to get ALL of the following loot from today’s post!   These fantastic green prizes were generously provided by eco-friendly companies we love. The best news about this generous giveaway is that you can enter multiple times!  We’ll pick one winner who will get all of these green goods delivered to her doorstep just for entering.  Read the end of this post carefully for directions and thanks for visiting today!

• A copy of our book! Of course, we think the best prize is The Eco-nomical Baby Guide: Down to Earth Ways for Parents to Save Money and the Planet. It’s packed with hundreds of ways to save money while going green with baby.
• A HappyBaby gift pack, including organic baby food samples, an Eric Carle growth chart from YoBaby, an Infant & Toddler Nutrition guide co-authored by Dr. Sears, and a set of HappyFamily recipes. HappyBaby is the company behind this fabulous organic baby guide, and their organic foods are available in supermarkets everywhere.
• A Snugglebottoms Velcro diaper (unbleached ‘green’ cotton flannel) in the newborn size from Baby Bunz & Co. Baby Bunz & Co. has been selling cloth diapers since the ‘80s—before they made their comeback!
• A Diaperaps sample pack, including a cover, liner, and an infant size hemp/organic cotton fitted diaper. Diaperaps are adorable, waterproof, Velcro closing diaper covers that can be used with cotton prefolds.  They’re easy to use and very affordable.
• One pair of baby boy shoes from Pedoodles, in the style and size of your choice. You’ll love the style and durability of Pedoodles shoes!  Made from recycled leather, they are eco-friendly and adorable.
• An Under the Nile Veggie Crate. Under the Nile is known for their high quality organic Egyptian cotton, and this veggie crate will inspire hours of creative play as your baby grows.
• One organic boiled wool coverall ($88) from hessnatur.  This company makes adorable organic garments for baby that are just as fashionable as they are functional.

• One Crawl Turtle Teether is being provided by Speesees, a fun organic clothing company for young ones that we also featured in our book.  
• One container of Green Dragon Pest Solutions, an eco-friendly product that will hurt household bugs such as roaches and silverflies without harming baby.  It comes in a gel so that you can avoid icky sprays with baby nearby.                                                                        

Nine Ways to Enter the Giveaway

How do you enter?  Guess what?  You can enter more than once! Each way listed below gets you one entry.  All comments have to be posted BEFORE Sunday the 14^th Tuesday the 16th of March to win.

Remember, leave a separate comment on this post for each entry you want.  If applicable, please leave the link to your Facebook/Twitter/Blog in the comment you leave here.

1. Leave us a comment on this post.

2. Email a friend about our book, our blog, or this month’s giveaways. (and don’t forget to leave us a comment telling us what you did.)

3. Subscribe to our blog (look right under the search bar) Again, be sure to comment about it below!

4. Join our Facebook fan club

5. Link to us on Facebook or Twitter.

6. Link to this post on your blog!

7. Add The Eco-nomical Baby Guide to your “to read” shelf on Goodreads

8. Add our blog to your blogroll

9. Go read our post on Five Ways to Score a Free Copy of  The Eco-nomical Baby Guide and leave a comment there if you’d like to review our book on your blog.  (Make sure to read the post for more details!) Leave a comment here as well to make sure we can keep track of your entries.

***The contest ends on Saturday, March 13 Monday, March 15, 2010***

Winner will be randomly selected.

We will notify the winner via email and will get you in touch with these companies who will ship your products directly to you. Please Note: This contest is open only to U.S. readers.

Congratulations to Rose, winner of last week’s gift basket!

Have fun everyone!

Should I wear a special shirt made for breastfeeding moms?  Where would I sit?  Would people stare?  In the beginning of my motherhood adventure, public breastfeeding seemed complicated and impossible.

Now, breastfeeding is no big deal. I simply cover baby with a blanket, pull up my shirt (and any old shirt will do) and discretely put baby to breast. I’ll admit that I did enjoy my “Hooter Hider” before we accidently left it at a park, but I wouldn’t tell any new mother that she had to have lots of fancy equipment, clothing, or prearranged locations to nurse her infant.

I’ve breastfed in pizza parlors, grocery store aisles, dressing rooms, airports, buses, my car, restaurants, friends’ houses, and while walking through the zoo toting my babe in her Ergo carrier. I once breastfed her in church during silent meditation in the hopes of quieting her for a few moments.  It backfired, resulting in lots of loud slurping sounds which echoed through the room–causing smiles to appear on several faces.

Still, when I get even the remote sense that I am making others uncomfortable, I’m amazed by how many people are completely clueless about what I’m doing. One of my former middle school male students once chatted with me for twenty minutes while I fed my daughter in a cafe. I’m sure he would have been mortified if he had any idea of what was going on under her blanket.

If you’re on the bring of bearing your child, don’t waste any of your precious time worrying about how to breastfeed in public.  It truly is easy and you’ll get lots of practice on a regular basis thanks to your child’s appetite for milk.  Get out there and give breastfeeding on the go a chance!

Where is the most bizarre place you’ve ever breastfed your child? Help support those moms who are just getting started with their breastfeeding adventures!

Here at Green Baby Guide, it makes us giddy to fling free products into cyberspace, receive dozens of comments and then randomly pick our lucky winners.  If you love giveaways too, brace yourself for the month of March, when we shall be launching our biggest set of eco-friendly giveaways ever in honor of our book’s first month on store shelves.

Very soon we expect Angela will be whipping up batches of pureed yams, kale, and brown rice thanks to her copy of Super Baby Food. Congratulations and may you fill many dozen ice-cube trays with home blended delights for your babe!

While we wished we could send each of our forty-seven entries a box, Carol was the final winner of the Abe’s Natural Market vegan truffles.  Please savor their chocolate glory and think of the rest of us!

And about a dozen bloggers will soon have a free copy of our book delivered to their doorstep simply because they agreed to review it online.  Is this giveaway still going?  Absolutely!  Simply comment if you’re interested.  We’ll be sure to email you for your mailing address and then forward it onto our publicist so that you get a copy for review and maybe even a giveaway on your site.

Thanks to everyone for participating in our giveaways and brace yourself for more free goodies in the weeks to come!

After months of interrupted sleep, my husband and I were longing to having full REM cycles, dreams, and several hours of slumber.  Our baby is nearly eight months old.  Shouldn’t she be sleeping through the night by now?  Never mind that our son didn’t snooze a full night until he was nine months old.  Never mind that our parenting peers were having the same problem.  We were determined to find out how we could possibly get her to let us rest.

First we tried the food.  We loaded her up with pumpkin and pears right before bed, resolute in our determination to slumber.  Her response?  She woke up three times that night with diapers encrusted with orange-tinged poo.  Ugh.

Then we tried a different meal schedule and longer spans between her feedings during the day.  Our wise pediatrician reminded us that if she couldn’t last more than three hours during the day, how could she make it through the night?

Right!  We tried the new routine with some success but Jovi was still up every night at exactly 1am.  Why was she so precise?

We tried warmer pajamas, a fan for background noise, a slightly later bedtime… All of it in vain.  At 1am on the dot we were greeted by her desperate screams. Every. Single. Night.

Until last night.  My husband was up late and went in to watch her sleep before he hit the sack.  It was 12:55 and as he watched her snooze in perfect slumber, he heard a sudden loud beeping.  Yes.  The travel alarm clock we keep in her room has been set to go off at 1am for months.  It only beeps five times so it was never going off when we went in to get her.

Our poor, pumpkin stuffed babe!  We’ll see how it goes tonight…

One of the first natural baby food cookbooks to hit the mainstream, Super Baby Food, is still enjoying relative fame.  I was thrilled to find the first edition in its purple cover in a pile of garage sale books and happily paid a quarter to make it mine.

I eagerly rushed home and began reading, but found myself disappointed.  The book is loosely organized, full of anecdotes and often difficult to follow.  Although it’s over 500 pages long, there are really only about thirty critically important pages of information to read.

To be fair, I do love those thirty pages. Ruth Yaron challenges our ideas of traditional baby food by offering up other ingredients for home-blended meals.  She explains how to whirl up vegetables and fruits in your blender and then dump it into ice cube trays to freeze and store.  As baby gets older, she has tips for including egg yolk, beans, kale, and a variety of other healthy foods into a “super porridge” that can be inexpensively prepared.

Yager also has some fun recipes for toddler foods including tofu McNuggets, nutty millet pancakes and peanut butter pudding.   The creativity in food presentation and delivery are pretty remarkable as well.  For example, she recommends spreading a slice of bread with peanut butter and then wrapping it around a whole banana as a creative vegan hot dog.

It’s also fascinating that Yager’s children have been quite healthy based on their rich diet of whole grains, greens, and hearty proteins.  She insists that while most children are sick between six to twelve times a year, her family faces illness once or twice at most.

As a working mom with limited time, I found the book to be heavily layered with irrelevant details and tough to weed through. For example, in the middle of the arts and crafts section she goes into great detail about using zip lock bags, adult sized socks and duct tape to avoid purchasing snow boots.  On the same page she gives directions for shining patent leather shoes with petroleum jelly. I’m not sure either of those things even needs to be in a baby food book.  To be fair, I haven’t read the second edition which may have edited some of the cumbersome tidbits out.

Is it worth buying?  If you’re interested in making your own baby food for economic, health and environmental reasons it’s a good resource, but I would recommend checking it out from the library or picking it up secondhand.  I’ll be sending my copy out to a lucky reader who will be able to read the book for herself and develop her own opinion.  Simply comment by February 12th to be entered in our giveaway!

Have you read Super Baby Food?  Did you find it be a valuable resource?  Do you make your own food at home?

Now some of you have children who will willingly eat the family meal, spinach and all.  Well done!  I would love to know how you did it.  My three year old won’t be receiving specialized cuisine for the rest of his life but for now it makes mealtime infinitely easier.  Simply listing out a few ideas for breakfasts, lunches and dinners and then posting it has made life so much easier.   It means that we don’t have to think in the morning after a horrid night with the baby and that we can be sure to have items on hand for kid-friendly meals.

Before we tried this simple tip, we spent a lot of time standing before an open fridge trying to think of healthy combinations for our son.  Also, we made the mistake of listing several choices for him each meal as if we were catering to a very demanding customer.  Now we put his meal before him and find that he’s far more willing to try it.

Our son helped us come up with the list and buy some of the items that we needed to have on hand.  It helps him be involved in mealtime beforehand so that he’s less likely to balk when the meal is placed before him.

Breakfast

• Homemade cocoa-oatmeal, peanut butter and banana
• Cereal and milk, soft boiled egg
• Toasted bagel with peanut butter and raisins, frozen blueberries
• Cottage cheese, apple slices and peanut butter

Lunch

• Peanut butter and honey sandwich, carrot sticks, raisins
• Tortilla roll up with cream cheese and ham, cut into slices, edamame
• Cheese slices, crackers, garbanzo beans with dipping sauce
• Cheese sandwich, dried mango slices, dried seaweed (nori)

Dinner

• English muffin cheese pizza, frozen peas, blueberry smoothie
• Whole wheat pasta with tomato sauce, garbanzo beans
• Yumm bowl, apple slices
• Cheese quesadilla, lima beans, dipping sauce

I know this isn’t gourmet fare, but it’s nice to have a list of a few meal ideas to get us going. Do you have other favorite meal choices that your child loves?  Please share!

Before my son was a toddler, he was a perfect eater––gulping down pureed spinach with the best of them.  But when he turned two, all green foods became instantly poisonous.  So much for my dreams of a child who dined on feta cheese and kate!  Still, lately we realized that we weren’t doing a good job of stretching his food comfort zone and decided to try a few new tricks.

Four easy tactics have made an enormous difference at our house.  We’re expanding his palate, making simple foods, and avoiding the struggle over what to eat.

Here are our recent discoveries:

1. Limit snacks.  If Roscoe is really hungry at mealtime, he is far more likely to eat a healthy meal.
2. Serve healthy foods first. We put a plate of edamame or a bowl of lima beans in front of him first while we prepare the rest of our dinner.   Often he’ll work his way well through his appetizer before we get the rest of our meal on the table.
3. Sauce it up. Somehow everything seems a little more fascinating with a side of red wine vinegar or a blob of mustard.  Letting your child experiment with flavors for dipping is a huge way to market healthy food.
4. Have fun with presentation. When we ask our son to make a picture with raisins on top of his peanut butter bagel, he forgets that he hates raisins.  Sometimes cutting his quesadilla into triangle makes it suddenly glamorous.

What are your favorite tips for making nutritious food fun for your child?  Please inspire us!  Stay tuned for our upcoming post on meal planning ideas for your little one.

Today marks our final in a series of posts dedicated to saving cash while keeping the environment in mind.  (Check here, here, and here for some great frugal blog resources to support your money saving efforts.)  Over the past two years we’ve written dozens of posts on budget friendly, earth friendly practices, but we’ve picked our favorites to help you save money in 2010.

• Did you know that there’s one brand of high quality, name brand green laundry soap that’s far cheaper than even generics? Check this post to see how you can save money and the planet while tossing those yam-encrusted baby bibs into the wash.
• You can save hundreds of dollars by making homemade organic baby food, cloth diapering and breastfeeding.  All of these options are better for baby,  the environment and your budget.
• Should you register for brand new baby duds or hit yard sales for gently used garments?  You can probably guess which one we recommend!
• Why take the time and energy to cut back on family spending anyway?  Is it worth it?  Absolutely!  We explore the long term rewards of under indulgence for your family (and your child!) here.
• If you’d like to save over a thousand dollars to tuck into the college fund, you might want to start before your baby ever arrives.  Opt for secondhand duds for your maternity months and postpartum transition wardrobe.
• Does shopping organic mean that you’ll need to shell out hundreds of dollars on a weekly basis?  Not necessarily.  In fact, Rebecca feeds her entire family eat wholesome organic foods on a shoestring budget without too much effort.  Learn how she does it here.
• Those of us living without dishwashers use far more water and soap than our Maytag-owning peers.  What are some simple ways to save water and conserve suds?  Rebecca takes a careful look at the problem here.

Does all that penny pinching add up?  You’ll be happy to know that because of all that careful thrift, Rebecca just graduated into the dishwasher-owner category after an arduous kitchen remodel.  I am still dreaming of slipping my peanut butter covered spoons into the silverware slot of my newfangled Maytag someday, but for now I shall make good use of Rebecca’s dishwashing research!

The early days of breastfeeding can be wrought with challenges, but some of us make it through the first phase only to face other issues further along.  When work became really stressful for a couple of weeks, my milk supply suddenly plummeted.  We quickly went through all the frozen milk I had pumped during my maternity leave and I found myself with barely enough ounces produced every single day.  Luckily extra fluids, rest, and a daily dose of fenugreek (a natural herbal remedy for low milk supply) helped me get my output back on track.  Have you faced milk supply issues?  What caused them and how did you deal with it?  Your comments will help mothers who are struggling with this issue today!