By Daedra Surowiec of strawesome.com
I’m Daedra Surowiec and I am the artist, owner, president, and mom behind Strawesome. I have a passion for creativity, health, my family, and the environment. One thing that I personally love about my business is that it allows me to incorporate all these passions seamlessly, giving me joy and purpose in my work. I am far from perfect, but I do my best and have as much fun as I can while doing it.
I’m excited to be a part of the Cookin’ Greens Community because I love a good website that merges together copious amounts of information from different view points. Couple that with a great product and it’s a win-win for me!
Here are the top 4 challenges that we faced with our kids:
- Feeding an infant their ‘first foods’ tends to be a disgusting mess with most of the food not getting past their face and bib. Adjusting to food via a spoon is quite a new technique in comparison to breast feeding.
- Toddlers learning to feed themselves is also messy and tends to take time for them to get good at aiming and balancing their fork and spoon (or spork!). When they’re done, most of their food isn’t in their belly, but instead on their clothes, face and in their hair (we have pictures to prove it – see our 18 month old below). This doesn’t work well when we need feedings to go clean and quick on school mornings.
- Regardless of age, feeding cooked pureed vegetables to a child can be an instant failure. You know they need those leafy greens (and raw is more beneficial because you keep the nutrients in the food), but getting them to eat it is a long fought war with most battles lost.
- Ridding our children’s lives of harmful toxic chemicals, such as BPAs and Phthalates in plastics, is one of the top concerns on the planet. Where do we start and how do we prioritize?
GLASS STRAWS TO THE RESCUE!
Glass straws helped us overcome these challenges and made life easier and healthier. With our infant, we started ‘first foods’ with a regular width short glass straw. He wanted to try it after observing the rest of the family using glass straws. Everything he ate was pureed already, so using a glass straw combined with his innate ability to suck gave him a smooth and safe speed at which to eat. There was no training him on what to do! Each meal was done in record time, the baby was full, and there was little mess to clean up (meaning we didn’t taste a bunch of food). Mealtime became fun again!
This leads me into the challenge of getting greens into a baby’s diet. We regularly make green smoothies and did plenty of research on baby’s first foods, including reading Nina Planck’s book Real Food for Mother and Baby. What did we discover? That [gasp] rice cereal is not the best first food for a baby! After a few of the solids suggested in the book, we moved on to give our baby green smoothies (which he drank up with a regular width short glass straw). Not only did he get raw greens and other delicious organic fruits, but he loved it! So many infants have issues with constipation; I can honestly say our baby has never had that problem.
Our baby is now a toddler who loves to eat anything and everything because his taste buds have been exposed to many different foods. There’s never a struggle to get greens into his diet. Sometimes he’s so hungry that we can’t get food into him fast enough! Within minutes, I can whip up his favorite smoothie containing raw milk, grass-fed yogurt, avocado, banana and frozen mango. It’s thick enough to give to him with a spoon, but if he shows signs of irritability because of hunger, I take a smoothie width short glass straw and have him suck it up. This also works great with yogurt, applesauce and anything extra messy and runny.
Perhaps the most important benefit from using our glass straws is that our children are not consuming harmful toxins that are found in plastic straws. We are very thankful for that!
THE GOLDEN RULE
When we let our little one use a glass straw, we never let him hold it himself. As you may know, little ones like to throw things to the ground to see what will happen to them. If they do this with a glass straw, it will likely break and then you have a mess and a broken straw; neither of which is any fun! You can see from the picture below that we hold the straw for him so that it does not get played with or accidentally shoved too far into his mouth.
Like our glass straws, each child is unique and requires special care. As they get older, you will know when they are ready to use a glass straw unsupervised. Our oldest (now 10) was able to use a glass straw responsibly when he was 3. We trained him to keep it in his cup/glass and put them on the counter when he was finished to prevent any accidents, and we will do the same with our little one once he is old enough to be responsible. Now our oldest son’s favorite smoothie includes avocado of all things. Not many 10 year olds would choose that over a fast food milkshake!
