Fruit Flip Flop

Do you like my new flip flops below which I bought on Saturday at Target? I couldn't resist since they were on clearance (the price I paid is actually less than the price online) and I haven't bought a new pair of bought flip flops for many years.  The ones that I have been wearing (similar to these except less white on the tong part and more blue and brown), I have had since before I moved to SoCal which was about 6 years ago. Considering the fact that most people live in flip flops here, I consider it quite a feat (pun intended) that I have managed to keep the ones that I have for so long. I love wearing stuff till they absolutely cannot be worn anymore (and even then I try to revive it by patching holes up, glueing stuff back on, etc.)

Anyway, the flip flops don't really have anything to do with this post except for it being in the title. Below is what this blog entry is really about.

So for the longest time I had the hardest time getting bébé to eat fruit.  She liked vegetables instead and would eat kale, broccoli, peas, tomatoes, spinach, carrots etc.  I tried to figured out different ways to get her to eat some fruit such as making smoothies (didn't really work), making blueberry waffles (this worked), making oatmeal and banana bites (this worked) and getting her to eat raisins and dried apricots (this worked as well). Only recently did she expand her fruit eating repertoire to include strawberries, blueberries, peaches cantaloupe and grapes. 

I only discovered that she would finally eat these type of fruit because I had made a fruit salad for our weekly Sunday potluck at the evening church we have been attending at the pastor's home. On a whim I decided to spoon some of the fruit salad on my plate to try to feed her some, not expecting her to eat any of it. To my surprise she loved it. I am thinking it has to do with the natural sugars that come out when strawberries are cut up which had coated the rest of the fruit. We had some leftover at home so I gave her some more the next day and she gobbled it down. 

I am glad that she flip flopped from not really eating much fruit at all to now eating all kinds of fruit, but it turns out that what I should have been even more concerned about is her iron intake. We went to her the pediatrician last week for one of her wellness visits and it turns out her iron levels decreased since last time we went. Now I am trying all kinds of ways to get her to eat iron-rich foods (at the right time). Not that I wasn't doing it in the past but I remembered the fact that calcium prevents absorption of iron, after the doctor mentioned it to me at the visit. I realized that all that milk she was drinking was probably causing her body to not absorb as much iron as she would have if I had just timed giving her the milk differently. So now I am trying to get her to eat foods rich in vitamin C when I give her iron-rich foods since vitamin C actually aids in the body's absorption of iron and giving her milk later on.  Hopefully at the next visit, her iron level will be way up!