Travelling with toddlers and their tummies - round 2

Earlier this year I posted my top tips for travelling and eating eith little guys after we spent three and a half weeks in the UK and Croatia with Leo who decided he was a fussy eater on the way. Last weekend we went to a gorgeous wedding in New Zealand and it seems I have either:

a) learnt a lot since the last trip

b) become more organised

c) become more relaxed

It was probably a combination of all three but this trip was at least three million times easier than our European vacation.

I think the tips from my last post still hold true but I've got a new one - if there is something healthy that your toddler is crazy about, focus on getting this into them and letting the rest go. To illustrate - Leo is awesome at eating porridge and also avocado on grainy toast so I made sure he had this every morning and considered everything else a bonus for the rest of the day. It's really good for your mental health to look at the situation like this in my experience and they really will survive!

In other news, if you can ever get yourself to Waiheke Island, just across the water from Auckland, I would strongly recommend it. And while I'm on recommendations, we stayed at this amazing child-friendly, two-bedroom cottage called Larkfield and it's what a parent's dreams are made of - bucket of toys, kid-friendly DVDs, port-a-cot, proper kitchen, wipes in the bathroom, walking distance from the shops. My list could go on forever - go there!!

Hooray for preservatives

I read an article by Alyssa McDonald in the Sunday Life magazines in the Age on the weekend that argues that people shouldn't get hung up on not eating preserved food in its various forms and should really just limit their salt, sugar and fat consumption if they want to be healthy. Unfortunately it hasn't been posted online so I can't link to it.

My first reaction was obviously to want to argue back that surely eating fresh food should be a primary aim in any diet. Then it hit my, we had eaten all sorts of fruit and veg that day but almost none of it had been actually fresh - especially what Leo had.

To summarise what we ate - corn cakes using tinned corn (Leo prefers it) with salsa and sour cream , dried apricots for morning tea, pasta with frozen peas, tuna, pesto and some chopped fresh spinach, watermelon for afternoon tea, good quality frozen fish and vege dumplings with rice and sesame seeds for dinner (Gaz and I had an Asian style pork belly hotpot with eggplant and daikon).

So Leo had had a little bit of spinach and watermelon as his only fresh fruit and veg for the whole day. Everything else had been tinned, dried, frozen or mashed up into a dumpling. However, I still think it looks like a reasonable menu for a toddler which has really made me reevaluate whether preserving methods are really that bad.

Any thoughts??