A feeling worse than death I'm sure... at least that's what it feels like. I'm raising my third kid and still get moments of MG. I've been a mother for 7 years now, so I've learned what's best for my babes, what works for us and what I don't want. But now that I'm more health conscious and environmentally conscious, the guilt is rearing it's ugly head... Thank God I haven't had to supplement at all with this babe. I wasn't EBF with the first until almost 1 month old and with the second until 2-3 weeks old. Third baby has been EBF since minute 1. (Now I don't want any mommies to feel MG about breastfeeding if they can't, the saying goes Fed is best!)

So the doctor gave the go head to start solids at 4 months, well, while being on maternity leave and having knowledge in the medical field (I'm a nurse), I've been doing lots of evidence-based practice research on what's better to use and where to start. It's been practice for many, many "centuries" for babies to have rice cereal as their first solid, and that's what the ol' doc said to start. Well, this past April, the FDA finally caught up with times and said 'So that rice cereal you feed your babies.... yeeeeeah, it has lots of arsenic in it and we want to try to limit that.' WTF do you mean you just want to limit it now! It should've been limited from the start! I've fed my first two precious rice cereal!! (and thank God they are healthy ((knock on wood))) You never mentioned nasties in the food and I didn't think to research back then..... I've always made my own baby foods, only thing I never made was rice cereal. So I began looking up how to make my own rice cereal and while researching that, I've learned to just stay away from rice and rice cereal until babe is much older. I also waited until babe was 5 1/2 months to start solids... give the baby gut more time to mature and seal before feeding. So now that I'm armed with this knowledge, my heart sinks. Why couldn't I have known this with my first two? Why did I blindly say 'okay doc, rice cereal it is.' Why am I beating myself up?

There's more chemicals and nasties in our foods now than when we were babies and kids, the whole "gotta feed all these people in a short period of time". Although once my kids got off of rice cereal and ate mostly organic/natural and non-processed foods, my heart gets little pangs that I gave them the "dreaded" rice cereal.

I'm writing this post to mostly vent and for others to share, not to offend anyone. I know lots of people who still feed and swear by rice cereal, but we've decided it's not for our family.

What have you had mother's guilt about that you want to share?