to cook or not to cook

When Mr. Man started solids I was apprehensive to make my own 'baby food', especially when it came to meat & chicken. For some reason I was grossed out about pureeing steak, and there was no way I was going near fish. However, I slowly got over my disgust and started to make his meals. I even bought a cookbook for babies & toddlers, dutifully going through it, trying out different recipes and as soon as I found one he liked I would make 3 batches and load up my freezer; only to discover, the next time I went to feed it to him, his tastes had changed and he no longer liked it. This left my husband and I feasting on a variety of "gourmet" pureed and semi-pureed creations that would have been great had we been in our eighties, had no teeth and suffered from heart, liver & kidney illnesses that limited our salt, sugar and really any flavour from our diet. However, we're not. I slowly gave up on trying to make home made meals from scratch and began relying more and more on what the good 'ole supermarket had to offer.

Now that we're back at it again with Little Miss I have to admit that I've been very (perhaps a bit too much) relaxed in terms of what I feed her. In fact, unless it's been food from my plate I can count all of maybe 2 times that I have tried to make her a meal from scratch. And for good reason. Each time, she spat the food right back at me followed by the tightest lip pursing I have ever seen. She made it abundantly clear that she wanted NOTHING to do with the food on offer.

The strange thing is, I feel like I am the only mother out there that does this. That everyone else out there is madly boiling fruit, vegetables, meat and concocting all sorts of yummy options that their babies are gobbling up. Of course, reason tells me this is not true, if for no other reason the baby food section is almost always low on stock! Now if we're all in the same boat, why the facade? Why is it that when I mention Little Miss only likes store bought food, the room goes silent and all eyes turn on me like I just said I only feed my children McDonald's!