“Eww! Broccoli tastes nasty.”

Unfortunately, this is a sentiment shared by many toddlers.  Parents know that a toddler should be eating plenty of vegetables (according to MyPlate guidelines, 1/4 of their plate should be vegetables), but convincing your child to eat these foods can be a daunting task.  Although it may be difficult to change your toddler’s food preferences, it is possible to increase the vegetables in a child’s diet by following these 10 guidelines and by using NurturMe foods.

1. Introduce vegetables earlier.

Toddlers begin having strong food preferences at around 2 years of age. Introducing healthy vegetables into their diets before age two is a smart tactic to help your toddler become accustomed to the taste of vegetables. Then, as they grow older, they will already love or at least be accustomed to the taste. NurturMe baby food comes in 6 flavors that are suitable for children between 4 months and 4 years. Introducing NurturMe foods and appropriate vegetables early is a great way to accomplish this task.

2. Invent creative nicknames for vegetables.

Toddlers are often more willing to eat vegetables if you have creative names for them. Instead of broccoli, say baby trees; carrots can become orange swords.  Being playful and fun about vegetables encourages young children to eat them.

3. Cleverly mix in vegetables with foods they already love.

If your son or daughter already loves macaroni and cheese, incorporate some NurturMe Scrumptious Squash into the mix as you cook it. Your little one will love the taste and will unknowingly benefit from the additional vitamins and minerals provided by the squash. This tip can be used with many foods. Just add a package of a NurturMe vegetable that blends with the color of a food that your child already loves.

4. Eat vegetables with children.

Toddlers love to imitate those around them and love to please their parents with their actions. In addition to verbally encouraging your toddler to eat vegetables, eat vegetables with them. If a toddler sees you eating what you have prepared for them, they will want to eat the same thing.  Set a good example and provide positive reinforcements.

5. Let them prepare dishes with vegetables with you.

Toddlers will be more willing to eat a new meal if they helped in the preparation process. The dish won’t seem so foreign to them because they helped every step of the way.

6. Give them a variety of choices.

Vegetables have a variety of textures and flavors. Allowing your son or daughter to try several types of vegetables will increase the chance that they will like a few.

7. Cook the vegetables.

Cooking helps reduce the bitterness that toddlers often dislike about some raw vegetables. Cooking also makes vegetables softer and easier to eat.

8. Grow a garden.

Toddlers are more likely to want to eat a vegetable if it came out of their own backyard. Grow a garden and let your child be involved in the maintenance of the garden. Let them help you plant, water, and pick vegetables.

9. Praise your child for trying vegetables.

Encourage your child to try unfamiliar vegetables, and praise their “ bravery” when they do.  Avoid using punishment and taking away privileges if your toddler refuses to eat vegetables – some children are very taste-sensitive and simply can’t stand certain tastes.

10. Take your toddler to the grocery store with you.

Let your toddler choose from the variety of colors in the vegetable aisle. They are more likely to eat a vegetable that they were attracted to and allowed to choose.

Our friends at TOMS Shoes invited us to discuss our Feed The Children campaign on their “Start Something That Matters” blog, started by TOMS founder, Blake Mycoskie. We are so grateful for the opportunity! You can read the original post here.

If you want to start something that matters, at some point early on you need to figure out where to begin. It was with the below-listed items that I took the idea for creating baby food in a new & different way and turned it into a reality.

INGREDIENTS

1 Thing you passionately care about (in this case, organic foods and healthy babies!)

1 Hardworking and trustworthy partner

4 Advisory board members

3 Reputable suppliers

1 “Yes” from a buyer(s)

180k in startup funds

Countless hours on the road, at the computer, in meetings, on the phone, etc.

An open mind to the opportunities that await

A will to make a difference and give back

PREPARATION METHOD

After I gathered and made use of the first seven ingredients, things began to happen. Last March, my partner Lauren and I were setting up a booth to debut our product at an annual, all-natural foods expo – the Mardi Gras of all things organic, eco, and basically, cool.  Seriously – even Fabio was there. It was late, we were tired, my two-year-old was overdue for bedtime, and we still had several green carpet tiles needing to be installed. We’d been traveling since 6:00 in the morning and had spent a good portion of the sparse funds we had to attend the show – we were hopeful that our investment would pay off. The morning of the show, we arrived early to our partially-assembled, cheerily green-floored booth, completed the installation, and waited.

Suddenly, it started to rain. Passersby nodded enthusiastically when tasting the foods. Bloggers smiled heartily when listening to the story of how we got our start. Distributors and brokers filled their pockets with samples and sell sheets. Investors pressed business cards into our palms. Most importantly – especially at that early stage – the buyers came. A team of three sales execs from a baby superstore chatted up Lauren while a broker interrupted his sales pitch to me by saying, through clenched teeth, that’s our biggest competitor, before he turned around to address the threesome with polite flourish.

It all happened quickly. Over the course of the three-day expo, we landed several new accounts, including one 400-plus store chain that would take our brand to a national level. As thrilling as it was, it wasn’t unexpected; it felt as if what we’d been working towards was beginning to unfold before us.

Then other things started to happen. An opportunity to blog for Forbes.com. An opportunity to present our product in front of a nationally televised audience. A blurb in In Touch Weekly – a favorite guilty pleasure– that mentioned Ivanka Trump’s preference for our baby food. Could all this really be happening?

Needless to say, all of the hype has been exciting. But, in the twenty months since our product launched on retail shelves, another more meaningful opportunity has also emerged among the noise. Quietly and consistently, throughout the entire time our product has been on the market, people have suggested to us that we get involved in some sort of charitable effort. I’d love to see you feed a million babies in Africa!, said one enthusiast. When disaster struck the Midwest last year, why don’t you send NurturMe to families in Joplin?, asked one of our Facebook followers. Our product is lightweight to ship; it’s got a long shelf life. It’s uniquely perfect for humanitarian & disaster relief efforts in ways that other products are not.

Here was yet another opportunity presenting itself, almost effortlessly. All we’d set out to do was start a cool new baby food business, and here we were with the chance to really do something that matters. A byproduct of pursuing your dreams, it turns out, is having what you set out to do evolve into something much bigger & more meaningful than you could have imagined.

After months of considering our options, then weeks doing due diligence on an appropriate partner, we decided we wanted to feed needy children in the US. Through a partnership with Feed The Children, we’ve launched a buy one donate one campaign with the goal of feeding 100,000 meals to children across the country over the next six months. (You can join us in these efforts by clicking here.) We are privileged to sell our product on shelves at places like Whole Foods and Babies R Us; but having the chance to feed healthy, organic fruits & veggies to families who would not be able to buy it for themselves is an honor. Not to mention tremendously humbling: the experience at the expo left us high-fiving and patting ourselves on the back. In reality, there’s so much more we can do to give back. What really matters is helping others, and paying forward the many blessings we’ve enjoyed since launching our product.

Starting this Valentine’s Day, we will begin donating one 18-serving variety pack to Feed the Children for every one purchased on our website. The goal of our Open Your Hearts, Nurtur For Nutrition campaign is to provide American children with over 100,000 meals over the next six months.

I have a love/hate relationship with breastfeeding. In the early days with Elle, it was mostly hate. I didn’t remember it being this hard with Audrey! Why was I engorged all the time? Why did I seemingly always have either a baby or a breast pump attached to me? Why was this such a commitment? I mean, really – it’s too easy for moms – deliriously tired, emotionally spent, desperate-for-some-normalcy moms to decide early on, this is for the birds! But lately – at last – my hate has turned to love, as the weeks have gone by and I’ve gotten into my nursing groove.

A few weeks ago, a mere nine weeks post-partum, I was still in the “mostly hate” phase of breastfeeding.  I was jolted back into my work routine by having to make a one-day business trip to Chicago to meet with the buyer of a huge national retail chain. The meeting itself didn’t make me nervous one bit; I didn’t flinch for a second that the success of this meeting could potentially double next year’s revenues. But wrapping my head around pumping throughout the day (when? where?), traveling with the breast milk, having enough of it stashed for my little one back home – these things gave me a stomach ache for days leading up to the trip.

On the morning I was to leave for Chicago, things got off to a great start. I woke up to a 4:30 alarm, dressed in the clothes laid out at the foot of the bed, left an emergency bottle of breast milk on the bedside table for my husband, then air-kissed him and the babe good-bye with my fingers crossed. I showed up at the airport for my one-day trip looking like an overdressed Christmas tree weighed down by ornaments.  Dangling from my limbs were a laptop, purse, breastpump, and a cooler for breast milk. I had brought these things not knowing how or where they’d be used, but confident I could figure it out and would get the necessary assistance along the way. That turned out to be mostly true.

Prior to my departing flight, I was relieved to find a “Special Assistance” restroom with an outlet and countertop, perfect for pumping. Setting up the pump, I was positively smug – working mom on the go! Taking care of business!  Comically, I even had the laptop out on the countertop in front of me and caught up on emails while I pumped. Though self-satisfied, I was also genuinely relieved to know this could be done, and that it wasn’t nearly as difficult as I’d anticipated.

Cut to about 10 hours later, and I was positively bedraggled. By then, I’d accumulated a cooler-full of milk in little Ziploc storage bags. I’d also gotten windburned by the Chicago chill, grilled by a hard-nosed retail buyer, and hustled through airport security not once but twice in one day.  When I found that mirage-like “Special Assistance” restroom sign at the airport, prior to my returning flight, I couldn’t wait to dump my collection of bags on the floor and give my tired body some reprieve. I reassembled all the parts to the breast pump for the third time that day, and began pumping.

In the years since I used this pump with my daughter Audrey, they’d made a change to the storage bags: now instead of a taping mechanism, the bags attach to a new component that hooks onto the pump. Refusing to buy yet another piece of equipment (even a silly, small plastic component), I stubbornly stuck a roll of Scotch tape in my pump bag and decided it would do the job. Well, after pumping two enormous bags of “liquid gold”, as breast milk is affectionately (and appropriately) called by many, one of the bags grew too heavy for my jury-rigging and loosed itself from the Scotch tape. It fell as if in slow-motion, about 6 ounces of breastmilk, all over the floor of Chicago O’Hare. I nearly cried.

But instead, I wiped the smug smile off my face from earlier in the day and accepted the fact that working motherhood is hard. Take an already challenging career and add to it extra pre-planning, organization, and endless gear. But in the end, all of it is worth it. Not least of all breastfeeding.

What I’ve come to love about nursing – now that the leaking, Lansinoh, and cold pack days are long behind me (you moms know what I’m talking about) – is that it affords me the opportunity to Slow. Down. There are few things more ridiculous, for example, than trying to eat a meal, one-handedly, while nursing a child. It inevitably leads to globs of some condiment or another on the nursing babe’s cheek and an impolite trail of crumbs on her soft spot. And typing while nursing – more like, pecking with one hand and backspacing every third key – is terribly inefficient. While nursing, a mom is forced to do nothing other than stop, slow down and focus in on the growing, ever-changing child at her breast. Except for when I breastfeed, I personally don’t get enough time during my day to sit around and stare at my little one’s fingernails. To notice how long her eyelashes are getting. To discover, yikes, I need to bathe those neck rolls more thoroughly next time!

These meditative, endearing moments with my daughter in between other, more hectic and distracted moments during my day, have not only given me an appreciation for the breastfeeding experience – but, strung together, they form the backbone of the intrinsic bond that has grown between me and Elle in the early weeks of her life. And for that, I am grateful. And, I’ll press on, despite business trips, endless to-do lists, and everything else, and will continue to breastfeed my daughter in the hopes of strengthening that bond with each passing day.

10. Wearing yoga pants and socks to work.

9. Getting the help of friends & family during work events.

8. Office walls filled with newspaper clippings and other mementos from our journey.

7. “Yacht Rock” internet radio, the soundtrack of our workday.

6. Brainstorming sessions around the kitchen table.

5. The personal sense of pride from reading a favorable product review.

4. The thrill of getting a “yes” from a buyer!

3. Getting to see our kids & pets during the workday.

2. Laughing all day long.

1. Inspiring others to live their dreams.