happybaby makes my baby happy :: review and giveaway

I am going to forewarn that this will be a bit longer of a review, but that there is an awesome giveaway to go along with all these great products so keep reading! With that being said, here goes…

When my sweet baby daughter turned 7 months old I decided that I really needed to step it up on the whole “trying new foods” program. We had already attempted a couple foods, but she stoutly rejected each and every one besides for her cereals. When it became obvious that she had actual interest in foods but she still wouldn’t eat what I was offering her I decided to look around for some other organic lines to try. That’s when I found HappyBaby and their great line of organic baby and toddler foods.

We started with the HappyBaby Frozen foods, specifically the Yes Peas+Thank You Carrots (the name makes me smile every time) and the Sweeter Potatoes + Purer Pear. I could honestly tell a difference between what I normally saw from a jar or plastic tub of baby food and what we had gotten from HappyBaby. Besides for the obvious differences in packaging, when thawed the HappyBaby Frozen foods seemed to be less changed from their original fruit or vegetable form. For example, every cube we thawed looked, smelled and tasted more like the fresh version of that fruit or vegetable than I had ever seen in a baby food not made at home. The Yes Peas actually smelled and tasted like sweet peas. The Purer Pears were a more runny consistency than the Sweeter Potatoes, exactly like I would expect if I had made those foods myself. (Which made me wonder what exactly those other companies are doing to the baby food I had used before to make every fruit and vegetable the same consistency?) While she didn’t do a complete 180 on her consumption of baby foods, I will honestly say that before putting her little mouth on lock-down she would eat about twice as much HappyBaby Frozen foods as she would the other baby foods we had tried.

Then we moved onto their HappyPuffs, Green Puffs. The Green Puffs stood out to me because they weren’t made with a fruit or sweet flavor, instead they contain spinach, collard greens and kale. Believe it or not, the Green Puffs were even better received than the sweet potato puffs we had tried from a competitor. HappyPuffs are made with whole grains and contain 1/2 the sugar as the leading brands. It’s also kinds nice to know that the HappyPuffs containers are 40% larger so I don’t need to go buy more puffs as often. Plus they come in 5 different flavors including Apple, Sweet Potato and Banana.

After that it was on to the HappyMelts freeze dried yogurt snacks. I was unsure as to how these would be received. Freeze dried yogurt somehow seems… wrong. But they have become my go to snack to stop the crying when I’m preparing meals or just need to distract the baby. We tried the Mixed Berry HappyMelts and they were pretty tasty but they never got the reaction that the Banana Mango HappyMelts get. All I have to do is show her the Banana Mango package from across the room and the crying stops. Some of the disks of freeze dried yogurt are fairly big though, so you will want to make sure you break them up into smaller pieces if need be.

Finally, we tried the HappyBellies Brown Rice Cereal with DHA and probiotics. HappyBellies cereal is the first baby cereal that I’ve personally seen (there may be others out there that I haven’t seen yet) that contains probiotics. This was really exciting to me because I suspected that the probiotics may counteract the natural constipating tendencies of the rice cereal and for my baby this seemed to be true. (I’m making no claims here, just stating an observation based on my child and what I observed with the use of this cereal.) It also seemed to have a better flavor than regular rice cereal, in fact the HappyBellies Brown Rice Cereal seems to be even more enjoyed than the baby oatmeal cereal that has been our standby food for months (and that’s saying a lot for baby cereals).

All in all, you can say that HappyBaby has a new convert. While we are still working our way through all the different foods (separately to eliminate any allergies), I’m excited to try out some of the HappyBaby Mix & Match cube ideas and recipes to help make sure we start our littlest eater on the path to healthy eating for life.

GET YOUR OWN: You can find these HappyBaby products at a store near you or visit the HappyBaby website to view their complete product line and purchase online.

WIN YOUR OWN!!! We get to give one lucky SIMPLE reader an awesome prize pack from HappyBaby including a HappyFamily Nutrition Guide, Recipes and two coupons for each of the following product lines (as in, you get to pick two items from each of these product lines for free!!!):

• HappyBellies Baby Cereals
• HappyBaby Frozen foods
• HappyPuffs
• HappyMelts
• HappyTot or HappyBaby Pouches

To enter visit the HappyBaby website and come back to tell us what HappyBaby product fact not already mentioned in this review that you are excited about.

Extra Entries: (Leave a separate comment for each entry)

• Tweet this giveaway: Enter to win a prize pack from @HAPPYBABYFOOD over at @simplereviews:http://tinyurl.com/mkulsd #giveaway
  
• “Like” HAPPYFAMILY on Facebook
• Sign up for the HappyBaby newsletter

WINNER will be randomly selected and announced on November 27, 2010.

*In order to conduct this review I was provided with the above mentioned HappyBaby products for free. The opinions provided are my own.