I have a confession to make:  I'm an impulse buyer.  I have an impulsive personality and I have a tendency to make impulsive purchases.  

My one redeeming quality is my thirst for knowledge.  So I do USUALLY research things to the bone before buying them.  As I did when I was looking for a baby food cookbook when Jane and Emma reached solid foods age.  

Looking back, I now realize that as much as I love Annabel Karmel, in retrospect I probably could have gotten recipes by simply Googling them.  For free. 

How did I figure this out, you ask?  

Well, at our last check up, the doctor told me that it was time to start giving Jane and Emma "table foods".  She did not really elaborate on what that meant, but I pictured in my head handing them a chicken leg from my plate as I would the family dog.  But that couldn't be right, I figured, because the doctor followed her advice with "But no salt or sugar or honey."  Hmph.  That's what I cook ALL "table foods" with.

I promptly went home and Googled.  


The following is my list of favorite go-to Google-found baby food recipe sites.  I use them for IDEAS, and then I do my own thang.  

Homemade Baby Food Recipes.  A compilation of recipes from firsts to fulls. 

Momtastic's Wholesome Homemade Baby Food.  I love this site because it gives you nutritional facts along with awesome, easy recipes.  

Baby Food Recipes by Annabel Karmel.  No kidding.

Weelicious.  First, I love the name.  Second, you can search by ingredient and then narrow by meal, cook time, etc.  It's so quick and easy!

Pinterest Baby Food Recipes Board.  When all else fails, consult Pinterest. 

Currently, Jane and Emma's favorite "table foods" are grilled cheese, pasta primavera, French toast, and chicken and rice.  They seem to have some sort of milk and egg sensitivity, so I tweak recipes as much as possible, attempting to maintain the integrity of the food that I'm cooking for them.  I also use whole wheat everything I can, and although everything I have read has said to give them brown rice, I give them limited amounts of white basmati rice and haven't had any issues. 

When Hershey and I get home from school, it's about 4:00 and it is on like Donkey Kong.  Jane and Emma are done with their naps for the day, and ready to play with Mama and Daddy.  But by 4:45, they just want to chow down.


For the past few weeks, we have been waiting to eat until after they go to bed, which means we were eating at around 8:00 every night, and then going to bed at 9:30.  That's just NO GOOD.  It's no good for our waistlines, and no good for avoiding heartburn and getting a full night of restful sleep now that the babies are pretty much sleeping through the night.

When I shop, I often find myself drawn to chicken thighs.  I have a chicken teriyaki recipe that I've been using for years that uses chicken thighs, and they are so versatile, so I buy them often.  And the best part is that they are SO SUPER CHEAP and have equal parts light and dark meat.  I mean, they are a pain in the butt to clean if you plan to strip them of all of the fat, but I learned long ago to just let the fat lie, as it adds an extra layer of nomminess to the dish.

But I was sick of teriyaki.

So I found this recipe on Pinterest, and it was SO EASY.  I used skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs, but I stripped the skin and most of the fat from the thighs.  I put brown rice in my awesome rice cooker while we gave the girls their bedtime bottles, and sauteed some sliced up onions and red peppers (I sautee them in canola oil, put some s&p once they get a lil crispy, and then toss in about 1/4 cup of white wine and let it all cook down).  I threw all of it together on a plate, and the whole dish took 20 minutes.  We ate before 8:00, and I had enough to bring to work with me for lunch the next day.

This is an extra great recipe because I now know that I can make it as the girls are having some Cheerios or Puffs before dinner, and then we can eat WITH the girls at 5:00, which is well worth it because once we put the girls to bed, I can just SIT DOWN for the rest of the night.  This is key, because the 3 hours between when we get home and when the twincesses go to bed are CRAYYYY!

Additionally, I've been trying to do some different things for Jane and Emma in the food world, since they are chewing now.  It's super easy to just take the ingredients of whatever I am making for us for dinner and throw them together into a dish and bake them in the oven.  I also keep sweet potatoes and zucchini on hand at all time.  Here's why:

The girls LOOVE sweet potatoes, and they mix with almost anything, or they can even eat them alone.  I wrap them in tin foil and bake them in the oven on 350 for about an hour or so.  Then I slice them open, peel the skins off of them, and mix a bunch of cinnamon in.  I mash them up with a fork, and they LOVE them!

Zucchini is another fave of Jane and Emma, and it mixes with everything and gets them some greens.  The taste is so light, I can literally put them with anything and the girls will eat them.  Sometimes I even just mix them with some cheddar cheese and toss them with the sweet potato for a hearty, easy meal for them.  I put the zucchini into little 2 oz OXO containers and freeze them, so that I can just pop one out and mix it with whatever the girls are eating.  It's such a great way to get them their balanced meals!

Side note:  I took one of the thighs from the package from the other night and baked it in the oven, and then mixed it with some sweet potato and shredded cheddar cheese.  I cut the chicken up really small, and served it to them chunky.  They initially made a funny face because of the texture, but once they got the hang of chewing it, they loved it!

Another really fun thing that we do now is have scrambled eggs together for breakfast on the weekends.  At 8:00 I pop Jane and Emma in their chairs and give them some Cheerios, and they watch as I scramble eggs.  I mix the eggs with some cheese and sometimes a peeled, seeded tomato, and they have a ball feeding themselves and watching me eat with them!  It's such a fun weekend tradition that we have made!



Listen, there are only a few hours left to enter the giveaway!  I'll be announcing winners tomorrow, so keep a lookout!

I hope that these recipes help you to simplify your life.  Please keep an eye on my Pinterest page for more recipes like this one, as I am a TOTAL foodie, I love to cook, and I'm always looking for the path of least resistance for making family dinners fun and delicious.

Happy Humpday!  xoxo

Hershey and I are chronic offenders.  If anything (and I mean ANYTHING) doesn't go our way in the course of our day, we order in.  

It all started when I was pregnant.  I lost my sense of taste, and everything made me nauseous.  So I stopped wanting to cook.  I distinctly remember one night early in my pregnancy when I was trying to cook a meal for us.  I realized that nothing tasted right, and I put WAYYY too much garlic salt on my green beans.  That was the breaking point.  I stood in the kitchen, crying, holding my bamboo spatula, screaming, "I CAN'T EVEN COOOOOOOOK!!"

Now, if you know me at all, you know I love to cook.  Cook, bake, you name it, I'm in the kitchen doing it.  Therefore, this moment in my pregnancy was quite traumatic for me, and from that point on, we ordered in.  

Fast forward to the birth of the little ladies.  Since we spent 6 weeks running to and from the NICU, who had TIME to cook?!  My mom, inlaws, and family members brought us tons and tons of food, and thank goodness for them!  But whenever we didn't have food dropped off, we had it delivered.  I mean, we are definitely putting some delivery guy's kid through college based on our delivery tips alone.

When I worked in Newark, I tried making us a weekly menu.  I sat down on Sunday nights, and I typed up the menu for the week.  Here's what it looked like:



B-T-Dubs, we are currently #1 in the Twins/Multiples category on Top Mommy Blogs!  Thank you all so much!  Please keep clicking to show us some loooove!

Reflection.  In teaching, reflection is a big part of what we do.  I was recently observed by my principal and he challenged me with reflection.  How can I SHOW that I reflect on my practices?  How can I PROVE that I am always thinking about what I can do better, and that I'm implementing strategies to make me better at what I do?

Parenting is like teaching in many ways.  After I put Jane and Emma to bed at night, I fill bottles for the next day and spend time with Hershey, but I'm always thinking about how I could have done something better for them.  How I could have BEEN better for them.

For the sake of reflection, I'd like to take a moment to reflect on the month of October, and give you the top 10 things that I learned about being a Mommy in the tenth month of the year.

10.  At some point, you have to start putting bibs on the kids AT ALL TIMES.  Unless you want to do their laundry 413 times a week or just start taking out stock in Old Navy Baby and burning their clothes.  Then go right ahead and live dangerously.

Notice Mommy's bottles to the left.  ;)

Playtex Brushes that came with a drying rack that I no longer use.

I use a regular tupperware container to soak the nipples, and a separate sponge from the one I use for the rest of the kitchen to clean the parts by hand when needed. I hand wash the nipples to avoid dishwasher detergent residue and to keep the nipples young!

The baskets that saved my life! Fun Fact:  Don't wash your bottles in the dishwasher with anything covered in spaghetti sauce. I dyed all of my bottles and bottle parts ORANGE and had to replace parts because they looked DISGUSTING!

The hubs took about 15 of these sanitizing baggies off of a Medela table at a baby expo, and was so proud of himself that he got us some free swag! This is the new drying rack that I use.  It takes up hardly any space, and I can pile stuff up on this like there's no tomorrow.  Drives the hubs crazy, but I love it!

I found this warmer cheapest on Amazon, and it was delivered in two days for free with my Amazon Mom account!

Shout out to my friend Staci at My 3 Monkeys Designs for the AWESOME subway art of the girls' names behind the glider. Please visit her page, like her and consider purchasing some swag for your babe's room!

The "Babies Sleeping" sign above the glider was purchased from this shop on Etsy.  She was wonderful to work with.