I wanted to start by telling you a little bit about myself. I am a new mother to a precious 11 month old baby girl. My husband and I have always been very passionate about healthy eating and exercise; however during my pregnancy we got even more into as you suddenly become aware of what ever I am eating our unborn child was also eating. So we carefully read labels and slowly integrated dietary changes into our lifestyle, avoiding all the things that you are to avoid in pregnancy (will talk more about that in a future post).
I had always lived a vegetarian lifestyle from the time I was able to talk and refuse to eat meat, over the years people would always be pressuring me to eat meat I would dabble with it here and there but truth be told I was not interested in meat at all. I would eat yogurt and cottage cheese to help with my calcium intake this was before I was knowledgeable of all the alternatives available today. My husband is a far cry from a carnivore but he always enjoyed his meat, in 2008 we eliminated all dairy products from our diet (except gelatin free pro-biotic yogurt) and to my surprise it didn't phase my husband in the least he quickly realized that things like cheese were merely a mask for nearly everything (not to mention huge calories). So we experimented with that for several months at the same time eliminating beef and pork from the house (I never understood why people at that anyway), I didn't want to "tell" my husband he couldn't eat these things anymore so I simply stopped buying them and cooked alternatives we got into tofu and a huge variety of lentils and beans (more to come in later post), he was amazed at how tasty these alternatives could be.
After the birth of our daughter Jan 2010 we once again became very aware of what we were consuming our daughter "Julia" was exclusively breastfed for the first 6 months so again everything I was consuming she was also.
Once Julia turned 6 months it was time to start her on "real" food, the door of possibilities was wide open and we had to source out what we would be putting in her mouth (much more of this to come I just want to give an overview in this post). At this time we decided to decrease - ? eliminated the two remaining meat items from our diet salmon and chicken, when we ate chicken it would be once every 2 months and only organic pure chicken breast and salmon maybe once a month, but after reading so much about fish and fisheries we really decided that if we were going to eat salmon it needed to be fresh wild salmon well finding that is like finding a needle in a hay stack... salmon was honestly one of my favorites so rich in omega's which are so vitally important in pregnancy (but there are many other sources we will talk about later) but once you starting looking into vegetarian and vegan diets you quickly realize there is an entire world of possibilities.
So in this blog I am going to talk about our journey of becoming vegan + but more so the choices that we have made for our daughter there are few resources on vegan eating (although this is changing rapidly) there are even fewer resources on feeding a vegan baby, on top of that people who don't understand a vegan diet/lifestyle some how make you feel that you are depriving your child when in reality they are getting more variety. I have made and created all my daughters food, as she is starting to eat more variety and I can experiment with things more I feel compelled to share our story, recipes and such.
Thank you for reading my first post I will be writing more about our story very soon we just had to start somewhere.
Jessica
