Day Seven: Domestic Day

It was a very domestic day around the Lovejoy-Fordham homestead. We did the grocery shopping, the laundry, the house cleaning. I always feel like I write better when things are in order. Isn't there some old saying that goes, "A tidy home is a tidy mind"? I definitely feel more focused when everything is in place about me. However, especially with LB, it's not always possible to have a clean house. Writing conditions are not always ideal, but that's not an excuse for not writing. As Peg Boyle Single has pointed out in her column Demystifying the Dissertation, we don't often feel the need to have clean dishes before we check our email, but we think the dishes must be washed before we sit down and write. Stop procrastinating!

At any rate, the house is clean now, and I also made LB's food for the week. I got some beautiful broccoli at the farmer's market on Saturday (see above), so I made her some more broccoli, zucchini and potato puree. She seems to find this dish so-so. I had a taste of it; it's pretty bland, even by baby food standards. I also made her lentil stew (see the before and after pictures below).

I wanted to make her a dish with beans because I've been concerned that she isn't getting enough iron. Not that she seems unhealthy or anything--I just suspect this is something a mother worries over, and I read that after six months babies need to get more iron from food because they are no longer drinking as much breast milk and are consequently not getting enough iron from their mamas. I was so concerned with this intake that I went out and bought her some jars of sweet potato and chicken puree. I'm not opposed to her eating meat (lots of people have asked me about this). I do realize that meat has lots of nutritional value for little growing bodies, but I'm not going to cook it. The meat cooking is done by Tom around here, so she'll have to wait till he cooks something up. Till then, it's lentils and beans for her!

A jar of that baby food, however, contained only 2% of her daily needed intake of iron (I bought the Earth's Best Organic brand)! I thought this was a pretty poor show. And the chicken was the last ingredient on the list, so in reality it probably only contained one little morsel. LB of course didn't give a damn about all this. She ate an entire jar of it yesterday and tried to extract every last little drop.