The other day David asked me for a banana, and when I handed it to him he looked at me the way I look at people when they say “literally” when they should have said “figuratively”.
Turns out, the banana broke when I put it on the table. We haven’t had that sort of drama at our table since the time I accidentally gave him Mary Virginia’s fork. But, what am I doing? I don’t have to explain it here, I’m sure you saw the entire drama unfold on the local news.
My kids are picky, particular eaters. Even Mary Virginia, who isn’t nearly old enough to be picky. She’s picky.
Each time Mary Virginia has gotten an ear infection, part of what I dread is the 10-ish days of antibiotics, because they do a number on her little belly.
The best way to combat the upset stomach is to consume probiotics. We’ve tried lots of things to get probiotics into Mary Virginia’s diet including dissolving probiotic powder in pear juice and forcing it into her mouth with a syringe while she spit it all over Tom’s shirt.
I wish I could give Mary Virginia healthy, delicious, probiotic-filled yogurt, but neither of my kids will eat yogurt. Their favorite foods are ones that start out void of nutritional value and are then processed, dyed, candy coated, and endorsed by a cartoon. The only yogurt they’ll eat are fancy freeze-dried yogurt drops you can find in the baby food aisle that cost $87 an ounce.
When my children are older and I’m telling them about the hardships I endured when I was growing up, I’m specifically going to mention that those yogurt drops hadn’t been invented yet.
I’ve seen this idea on Pinterest, and after our most recent round of antibiotics I decided to try it.
Frozen yogurt drops
Just spoon yogurt into a baggie, snip the tip and squeeze onto a wax-paper lined baking pan. Freeze for about an hour. Pop ’em off the wax paper and store in a freezer bag.
This really is a great idea, but we had a few hiccups. So I wanted to share how it worked for picky, particular Kriegers.
This is my first batch. I used two big spoonfuls of plain yogurt and one spoonful of strawberry yogurt. (I added the strawberry because I really really wanted her to eat them. In the future I’ll just use plain yogurt to avoid the extra sugar.)
Mary Virginia liked these, but they were way too big for her. They’re about quarter-sized, and she started crying pretty soon into eating them, I think, because her mouth and hands were cold (she just held them and cried). I reverted to biting these big drops into pieces, mama-bird style.
For my second batch I made much, much smaller drops. You can probably see the size difference if you compare this pan to the one above.
This is a really great idea, and the only way Mary Virginia will eat yogurt (David won’t touch them), but they do have some drawbacks. In addition to using both wax paper and a Ziploc, they aren’t portable at all. I wish I could pack them as a snack, but they melt really, really fast. Even when I’m giving them to Mary Virginia, instead of keeping the bag out the whole time she’s eating, I take a few out and put the rest back in the freezer until she’s ready for more.
We also run out of them in like two days. It seems like they should last longer, but you have to remember that it’s really only about three big spoonfuls of yogurt. This is sort of a work-intensive process to get your kid to eat three spoonfuls of yogurt.
But they are cheaper and healthier than those fancy freeze-dried ones.
AND!
And, they pass this test, the only test that matters: Mary Virginia will eat them.
For that, squeezing yogurt out of a baggie seems like a small price to pay.
