What’s New at Wholesome Toddler Food?



fruit snacks

24 August 2007 – Fall is almost here!



With the help of our imagination and mother nature’s tools, fall crafts for kids can be a thrifty and enjoyable family activity. Here are a few frugal fall craft ideas for kids that are fun and easy to put together!

16 August 2007 – FDA Warning on ough medicines and children under 2 years of age.



(AP)  August 16, 2007
The U.S. government is warning parents not to give cough and cold medicines to children under 2 without a doctor’s order, part of an overall review of the products’ safety and effectiveness for youngsters.

Amid questions about benefits and risks, the Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday its will meet Oct. 18-19 to discuss the use of cough and cold drugs by children.



The FDA issued a public health advisory that cited serious adverse effects linked to children — particularly those 2 and younger — who have received too great a dose of over-the-counter medications for coughs and colds.

Parents should carefully follow directions for use that come with a medication, the FDA said. Other recommendations in the advisory included:



  • Do not use cough and cold products in children under 2 unless given specific directions to do so by a health care provider.

  • Do not give children medicine that is packaged and made for adults. Use only products marked for use in babies, infants or children, sometimes called “pediatric” use.

  • Cough and cold medicines come in different strengths. If unsure about the right product for a child, ask a health care provider.

  • If other medicines, whether over-the-counter or prescription, are being given to a child, the child’s health care provider should review and approve their combined use.

  • Read all of the information in the “Drug Facts” box on the package label to know the active ingredients and the warnings.

  • For liquid products, parents should use the measuring device that is packaged with each medicine formulation and is marked to deliver the recommended dose. A kitchen teaspoon or tablespoon is not an appropriate measuring device.

09 August 2007 –

Limited Portions just got fun! The Yum Yum Dish is for using to enjoy your favorite snacks. It helps remind you when you’re all done! Buy it in a bag, but eat it out of a Yum Yum Dish!



The creation of Tracy Adler, she notes

“After my second child was born I realized I was snacking too much. I’d drag a bag of chips off the shelf and head for the couch. Before I knew it, half the bag was gone. The fact is, I didn’t realize how much I was eating. I decided to do something about it.

I started using a small dish for snacking. As long as I didn’t re-fill the bowl, I could never over-snack! In a short time, I was back to my original weight. I thought others might like to try out this simple method of portion control. The Yum Yum Dish was born, a 4 oz. dish that’s fun and easy to understand.”

Let’s face it, there will be a few times throughout your Toddler’s life that snack time may involve a rare “unhealthy” treat. This Yum Yum Dish will help your Toddler and older kids know when snacktime is over; no ifs-ands-or-buts! Use this dish for even those yummy healthy treats as well. The dish is just one more tool that will help parents teach their children about portion control!

Visit the site at and check out the great colors available! *Please note that these dishes are ceramic. When using these for your Toddler, you may want to ensure that he or she is sitting at the designated “snack area” and does not run around. One more great way to help control snack time!

03 August 2007 –

We have changed the wholesometoddlerfood.com website and are still fixing up leaks and springs!

03 August 2007 – Why Do Children Experience A Vocabulary Explosion At 18 Months Of Age?

 Researchers have long known that at about 18 months children experience a vocabulary explosion, suddenly learning words at a much faster rate. They have theorized that complex mechanisms are behind the phenomenon. But new research by a University of Iowa professor suggests far simpler mechanisms may be at play: word repetition, variations in the difficulty of words and the fact that children are learning multiple words at once.

“The field of developmental psychology and language development has always assumed that something happens at that point to account for this word spurt: kids discover things have names, they switch to using more efficient mechanisms and they use their first words to help discover new ones,” said Bob McMurray, assistant professor of psychology in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. “Many such mechanisms have been proposed.”

In an article about his study on the topic being published Aug. 3 in the journal Science, McMurray writes that children may still engage those specialized mechanisms. But a series of computational simulations that he conducted suggest that simpler explanations – such as the repetition of words over time, the fact that children learn many words at the same time and the fact that words vary in difficulty – are sufficient to account for the vocabulary explosion.

“Children are going to get that word spurt guaranteed, mathematically, as long as a couple of conditions hold,” McMurray said. “They have to be learning more than one word at a time, and they must be learning a greater number of difficult or moderate words than easy words. Using computer simulations and mathematical analysis, I found that if those two conditions are true, you always get a vocabulary explosion.”

McMurray’s simulations are analogous to a series of jars of different sizes, each representing a word, with more difficult words represented by larger jars. As individual units of time passed, a chip is dropped into each jar. Once the jar is filled, the word is learned.

McMurray’s mathematical analysis suggests that the word spurt is largely driven by the number of small jars (easy words) relative to large jars (difficult words). As long as there are more difficult words than easy ones, the vocabulary explosion is guaranteed.

Few words in any language are used an overwhelming number of times in ordinary speech. So, if frequency of use is considered as a measure of degree of difficulty, languages have many more difficult than easy words, McMurray said.

Experts have long thought that once a child learns a word, it is easier for him or her to learn more words. Or in the case of McMurray’s simulation, the jars become smaller. But McMurray also simulated a model in which the jars became larger once a word was learned and found that the vocabulary explosion still occurred.

“If we see the same word spurt when we model the inverse of accepted thinking, then clearly the specialized mechanisms aren’t necessary,” he said. “Our general abilities can take us a lot farther than we thought.”

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by University of Iowa.