Womze – Cross Cultural Parenting

When I wrote about the Gerber pancake recipe, I found it amusing.  I wondered how a baby could eat a stack of pancakes.  I’m amused no more.  I know my baby can eat a stack of pancakes.  Maybe not a stack, but one or two pancakes.  At almost 9 months, he’s turning his nose at baby foods.  He wants to eat what the ‘big people’ eat but I fear that isn’t good enough for baby.

I need to pay extra close attention to what he eats and ensure that he’s getting proper nutrition.  So if he won’t eat his cereal, perhaps he can get the same cereal from pancake.  I grabbed the box of cereal to read the recipe I had previously scoffed at and proceeded to make a stack of pancakes which I planned to freeze so I could microwave one at a time for baby’s breakfast.

Note that recipes have quantities for a reason.  This one called for 1/4 cup of Gerber rice cereal, added to pancake mix.  This recipe is at back of the Gerber mixed cereal, I didn’t have rice cereal at hand and figured the mixed cereal would do.  It didn’t say how much pancake mix but I guess 1 cup, enough to make 6-8 standard size pancakes.  I look on the side panel of my Hungry Jack pancake mix and see 600mg sodium, 25% daily value.  I decide that’s too much sodium for my baby and decide I’ll make the pancake from scratch.

From scratch, I’ll make a real healthy, baby worthy pancake.  Low sodium.  I don’t have a measure of the sodium in my plain white flour but it’s got to be less than 600mg.  If I had whole grain flour, I would use that, but I don’t.  No egg whites, none of that allergenic stuff.  More Gerber cereal, less flour.  Baby formula, not the 1% lowfat in my refrigerator.  I stir in a jar of 1st Foods peach…Perfect. 

As I threw small scoops of baby-worthy pancake mixture on the hot pan, I thought of how I would blog about this.  I would share my baby-worthy pancake recipe on the blog, act like I was a really smart mom.  I look at the neat stack of pancakes – they’re not perfect circles like the store-bought frozen pancakes (yes, my daughter eats those), but it is a neat stack nevertheless.  I should grab my camera, take a near-professional photo to accompany my blog post.  I wonder what the pancake tastes like.  I’d take one little taste.  Yuck!  Gummy, sticky, wet on the inside.  Tastewise, not terrible.  But texture?  Yuck!  It will take some doing to get this down baby’s throat.  Smart mommy blog post gone before it’s ever written.

No pancake for baby’s breakfast.  We some cereal and fruit, our former staple but he keeps averting his head.  After a brief game of dodge-the-spoon, I give in to cheerios.

Later I develop the bright idea to toast the pancakes, dry them out to make them easier for baby to chomp on.  I look for the pancakes but the stack is gone.  I ask Hubby if he saw my neat stack of pancakes.  He had handed them out to the older kids.  “You ate those?”, I asked my 6 year old nephew.  “They were delicious”, he declared.  It just goes to show that if I had followed the Gerber instructions – quarter cup of cereal added to pancake mix, we could have had pancakes for the whole family.