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The Cost of Convenience

I love the idea of making my own baby food for Rachel. It doesn’t sound like a lot of work. Just cook some foods, blend them up into a puree, and freeze them until I need them. I can control what goes into them (and what doesn’t) and I can be sure to use organic produce on those few items that I feel it’s important to spend the extra money. It all sounds wonderful.

Except for the fact that I’m already stressed to a breaking point trying to do more than I have time for each day.

Not only am I doing well to just get both kids fed some mornings, I rarely have time to eat breakfast myself because I’m juggling too many other things and putting out fires here and there. So the idea of adding one more thing on my “to do” list like making my own baby food just doesn’t sound like a good idea at this time. So Gerber baby food it is…

I go to the grocery store every few days for something. Not big shopping trips but we always run out of something like milk or bread or baby food between the big shopping trips so I end up going several times a week. I always try to buy a few more jars of baby food each time I go since we go through about 6-8 jars a day. It’s not always easy taking two little children shopping though. As a matter of fact, it can really make the trip rather exhausting. So I’ve avoided going for a few days knowing we would be fine without this or that for another day or two. But this weekend completely ran out of baby food. I didn’t need anything else so I decided to stock up on it so I wouldn’t have to go back in a few days to buy more.

I came home with a nice stock of baby food. But instead of working a few jars here and there into my grocery budget, I saw just how much baby food by itself really costs. Can you believe this trip for just baby food cost me $43.00?! Wow, that’s a lot of money for about a gallon of pureed food. With all that I manage to get done each day, I really like having a few conveniences that I don’t have to worry about like little baby food jars that are already prepared, that I can just pop open and feed to Rachel as needed.

But as I take a look at how much this convenience is costing us, maybe I need to reconsider pureeing my own food for her. Now if only I could find a way to add an extra hour to every day…