I always help my DD with gifts to her dad, and I strongly suspect he helps with gifts to me. When they go out to eat, they order something for me and she brings it home for me.

I remember dating a guy ... we had only been dating a couple weeks when I went over his house for dinner ... we ate dinner then he came out with a plate of brownies ... how sweet he even made dessert.... He says I hope you like them... the girl downstairs made them for me ... what??? yeah I came home from work and she was in the hallway with these ... I stewed what do you mean she made you brownies ... he says yeah I guess I told her how you bake all the time and she wanted to see if I liked her brownies better than yours so she made me some... OH ... well I went on to explain how it wasn't right and she was "overstepping" blah blah blah ... the next week we were to go out to dinner he called and said he had already eaten, the girl downstairs had made him dinner so he wasn't hungry. I then said well since you have already eaten there is no point to us hanging out tonight... and I'll free up your schedule so you can have dinner and her baked goods anytime you want. Have a good one.

I still don't think he got it. :)

gifts to an ex for a specific purpose/holiday from the child that the other parent helped them purchase are one thing, and IMO totally fine. Gifts from the ex for no apparent reason are a little odd, but then again it can depend on the situation. Finedreams, for example, has been apart from her ex forever and they maintain a healthy, friendly parenting arrangement. I don't see if too odd that he might get her something every now and again, but I can see how her BF might feel threatened.

I'm a big gift giver though, so I buy or make things for people all the time. No one is safe! :-)

You know whats interesting. She'll give him all these random things and when I made SD some veggies to help with her Iron count and sent it home with her(BM doesn't do vegetables and didn't know for certain that I made it), she got all attitudy with BD. "I'm not eating this"... he ignored her, b/c um, it wasn't for you, it is for SD.

Weird.

Other than spinach what vegetables help much with an iron count? If someone were to send me a nice steak, on the other hand, personally I am not sure I'd question its source...

Plenty of vegetables have iron!
Brussel sprouts and broccoli... Canned or rehydrated legumes are crazy high in iron, but fresh peas and beans are not... Bok choy and kale... Baked potatoes are pretty high. Carrots are OK (not awesome, but cooked carrots have a fair bit of accessible iron)... Turnips (surprisingly)

Nuts and seeds are great iron sources too! So is dried fruit.

Keepit, if SD has low iron and you can get her to eat it, make her some Cream of Wheat with a splorp of blackstrap molasses and a bunch of dried fruit and nuts in it. Half a cup of Cream of Wheat has ~8 mg of iron! Add 1 T of molasses and that's another ~3 mg! Add 1 T of wheat germ and that's another 2.5 mg! Add 1/4 c or almonds and 1/4 c of raisins for another 3 mg. Right there, you have more than the iron RDI for an adult!

Just for reference, 4 oz of lean steak has the same amount of accessible iron as 1/2 c of pitted dates, 1.25 c enriched pasta, or 1.5 c of steamed broccoli. All are ~3 mg in the serving I mentioned.

Thanks Ceph, I didn't know cream of wheat has that much! I am glad this subject came up because my iron is usually low & I take supplements. I googled vegetables with iron (after theotherside posted) and got the link below.

I didn't think of things that inhibit absorption of iron. I'm a coffee drinker. I didn't think about it affecting my iron. I also thought it was a good thing to sprinkle bran on my oatmeal (along with wheat germ & flaxseed) I guess I need to study nutrition more.

Here is a link that might be useful: Iron rich foods

Caffeine is a big culprit for iron theft. But you can get it back to "null effect" by also having a glass of OJ... But really, if you're worried about nutrition, you're best to not drink your coffee with your breakfast, but to have it on its own, between meals, with a glass of water to combat the caffeine dehydration.

When we cook vegetables that contain iron (such as spinach) the iron becomes more accessible, because the compounds that adversely affect iron absorption begin to break down. This is a tossup though, in that cooking also decreases the vitamin content of many vegetables. One way to think of it is that if how you cooked the vegetables make them lose their colour (either made them much paler or turned them brown) you probably also lost the vitamins. So boiling them and draining away the water takes away a lot of vitamins, and so does cooking them in a pan on high enough heat that they brown.

Sprinkling bran on your oatmeal is also about finding a balance. If you put it there because you LOVE bran, then there is no other other option, and just have some OJ with it to balance it out. If you just put it there for the fiber, then 1/4 c of raisins has 3 g of fiber, or 1/4 c unblanched almonds has 4 g. That's actually more fiber than 1 T of bran, but also more calories.

I'm a big food dork and can spend HOURS at the grocery store reading labels. My nutrition textbook from my undergrad is actually getting tattered pages! I love this kind of stuff.

Never eat the liver of a polar bear, a seal, or a Husky dog. The absurdly high level of vitamin A can kill you... or at least blind you.
As put by my Nutrition prof, "Just stay the heck away from eating arctic mammals if you can't identify internal organs by sight!"

"Up to 22% of the iron in meat is absorbed, while only 1-8% is absorbed from eggs and plant foods. If the body stores fall, the rate of iron absorption rises. About 40% of the iron in animal foods is in a form called haem iron, while the remainder, and all the iron in plant foods, is in the less well absorbed non-haem form."

And this is from a vegan site:

http://www.vegansociety.com/html/food/nutrition/iron.php

It's certainly possible to get enough iron from vegetables and fruits if you try hard enough, but personally I would rather get a good portion of it from and 8 ounce steak or a couple of hamburgers with a baked potato on the side.

That was supposed to be "an" not "and" of course in my previous post. I wish there were a way to edit posts.

Thanks for the warning, Ceph. I knew there was a reason I didn't like liver (aside from the fact that I find the prospect of eating the body's filter is unappealing at best).

"I would rather get a good portion of it from and 8 ounce steak or a couple of hamburgers with a baked potato on the side."

While the steak sounds appealing, who could eat a couple of hamburgers WITH a baked potato on the side? That's a lot of food! I can't usually finish ONE hamburger and I doubt there's enough iron in half a patty. (not to mention the added fat in the cheese & other condiments that make a burger good!) But I'm with you on LIVER. Yuck.

I like having a scientist on the forum, though I'm rather upset that you blew my highly anticipated dinner of polar bear liver right out the window!! :-)

... since we're off on the tangent of iron and you are obviously knowledgable, I have a question... Is the iron in rust bioavailabe? I'm talking about regular old rusty steel iron oxide rust.

(reason i'm asking is i experienced a noticable and long-term consistent drop in my blood counts coincident with nothing i could think of... change in diet, change in weight, change in menstrual cycle, etc... except that i had replaced my 60 year old rusty steel plumbing with shiny new copper pipes and nothing but starting iron supplements got it back up. my theory is i was ingesting a significant amount of iron in my drinking water up until I updated my plumbing, but of course i have no way of testing that theory and have been curious ever since.)

Just to clarify, SD likes the spinach i make. BM just doesn't make veggies, and doesn't cook very much as it is.
I was saying it seemed odd that she'd give BD all these random things but would get attitude over some nutrition for her child.

Quirk, Do you take a lot of aspirin? I do and my blood count is low because of that...But I did ask my husband(who is a plumber) about your pipe question, he said it is possible in some cities to absorb iron from pipe.....

hey, dotz, no aspirin, I'm just a petite female with naturally borderline normal vs. very slightly anemic for my entire life. I had a couple years straight that my blood counts were high enough I was consistently able to donate blood (an anomaly of itself, and coincidentally about the time I bought my house) then all of a sudden they were consistently low. I know I was getting iron in my water... if I was out of town for a couple days it would be **visibly** rusty from sitting in the pipes just didn't know if iron oxide is in a form that the body can use, or if it needs to be in a different form... chemical reactions are tricky that way (I'm actually a chemical engineer so I know you can't just assume an element in any form is the same as another in terms of how it reacts but do not know enough about all the reactions going on in the body to know the specific details of how iron gets converted and used or what form it needs to be in to be useful).

Not a health problem, just a curiosity, and since we were on the subject...

Ima,

A quarter pounder contains about 3 mg of iron, about the same as 4 ounces of steak. It isn't that hard to find a 6 or even 8 ounce hamburger at some family restaurants. I am sure I could manage to eat one, along with a baked potato, though I don't do that every night, or even every week.

Quirk -
I'm not sure about iron from rust in pipes, as I'm not 100% sure what it's molecular makeup is... But I do know that the iron from cooking in cast-iron cookware is biologically available, so I assume the iron from pipes would be too.

TOS -
A few intriguing things about iron from vegetables... Vegetarians, and/or omnivores who eat a lot of vegetables, have much higher efficiency at absorbing and using iron from non-heme sources. That's in part because vegetarians typically have higher levels of ferratin and transferrin (proteins that recruit iron from food and stores in the body).
Vegetarians and veggie-heavy omnivores also tend to have high vitamin C intake, which also helps the body absorb iron.
An average omnivore gets only ~10% of their daily iron intake from heme sources, and 90% from non-heme sources. However, since heme iron is more efficiently absorbed, most omnivores do get a significant portion of heir iron from heme sources.
So a chili, made of meat, beans, and tomatoes, cooked in a cast-iron pan, and then served on enriched rice is mindblowingly high in iron.

A quarter pounder also contains 415 calories (23 g of protein, 36 g of carbohydrates and 20 g of fat)... These numbers are out of my textbooks.
So let's practice our math homework here: Most of us are premenopausal women, so based on a 2000 calorie/day diet, with an iron RDI of 18 mg, that burger provides 20% of your daily calories, 50% of your daily protein, 30% of your daily fat, but only 15% of your iron and 12% of your carbs (and white carbohydrate at that).
So in order to actually balance this out, the entire rest of your day should include only ~25 more g of protein, but 15 mg of iron and ~275 g of carbohydrates. Haha, good luck!
I'm not saying fast food isn't rich in iron, just that it's a terrible way to get your iron.

I'm a big nerd... and I spend most of my time learning...
I'm particularly a big science nerd and think food is neato.

My parents really don't have a good grasp on nutrition. They eat pretty well, but don't really understand why certain foods are good or not good for them, so they ask me lots of questions.
My SM recently asked me about how to interpret nutritional labels and know what is high or low in fat. This is what I told her:
"You should see fairly similar numbers in the %RDI for calories and fat in order to be getting the right amount of fat."
She asked why and I said "Because we should get about a third of our calories from fat. Fat has 2.33 times more calories per gram than protein or carbohydrates, so if your meal is 200 calories, or 10% of your calorie intake for the day, you also want it to contain about 10% of your daily fat, or 6.5 g of fat. That means that there would be 60 calories from the fat, which is about 30% of 200 - perfect!"
So now she looks for things to be approximately balanced for the percentages all the way down the labels, and if she sees that something is high in fat, but low in fiber, she pairs it with something high in fiber, but low in fat. She and Dad have both lost weight, feel awesome and are actually enjoying the food they eat - so I'm really happy!

Love all of the info on anemia and iron rich foods!

Anyhow, getting back to the original question.....my DH's ex has given him nothing but Grief, yep, with a capital G.

Right, back to the original question...
BM has given BF weird stuff in the past, but not since we got together.
If I had a complaint about that topic, it would be that BF pays for presents for BM from A__ (Mother's Day, Christmas, etc) but BM doesn't do the same. This past Christmas, BF didn't pay for a Christmas gift from A__ for BM, and she got mad at BF! Nothing major, just a couple snide comments about how A__ shouldn't have to spend his allowance to buy her a present, even though that's exactly what she told A__ to do to get BF a present...
Meh, not a big deal, just pesky.

She doesnt give him stuff but there was this one time before me and hubby lived together (we were dating) where I went with the girls and got biomom mothers day presents so theyd have something to giver her.

The next day was Mothers Day and when she picked the girls up I wasnt there. Daddy gave her the card and candy and what not. Well....it must of made her feel sentimental cause' two hours later she came back without the girls and tried to get him to sleep with her for "old times sake". He told her I had bought those presents, he didnt want to get her anything and that he loved me. She left crying. He called me immediatly and I could here his roomie laughing in the background. It was pretty sick and sad. Thay had been divorced for a year and a half. I moved in with him seven months later and she really flipped out. Good times.

ceph,

But, according to this site, four ounces of 85% lean ground beef is only 243 calories, 12% of the daily calories and 16% of the iron. Not to mention more enjoyment that a boatload of turnips.

Sure, 4 oz of ground beef contains that, but you seem to be forgetting that a Quarter Pounder contains a boatload of other crap and is practically boiled in fat.
That's like saying that since 1/2 c of broccoli only has 12 calories, then I must be only getting 12 calories when I drown that broccoli in margarine and cheese sauce.

i love turnips!!! more than meat! say nothing bad about my turnips :) :)

Fine . . . really? I may have to bean you with the lamp! Turnips over a yummy, totally bad for you Big Mac??? Complete craziness!! :-)

theotherside, in all fairness, you said 'quarter pounder', not a burger made with 85% lean ground beef. I guarantee that a quarter pounder isn't made with lean ground beef. (and I CAN'T eat anything from McDonalds without getting completely sick! and taco bell too.. they use fillers in their meat that make me feel like crap)

haha don't beat me up..i love veggies and fruits and dairy, i am not a vegetarian but i don't care about meat. i only eat meat once in awhile because i guess you have to for nutrition I guess. i can live without meat and poultry and even fish, just give me my brussel sprouts and turnips...:)

I'm with Finedreams!
I love vegetables and fruits and dairy. However, I eat fish and invertebrates, but not land vertebrates. Meat started making me sick when I was in my late teens, so I quit eating it when I was 20, and BOOM I felt better. Suddenly I could digest food again and didn't want to throw up about three hours after every meal!
I went for about 6 months where I didn't eat fish and seafood too, but then found that I really missed it, and they don't make me sick, so I picked that back up again.
The rare occasions that I eat fast food (definitely less than once a month), I enjoy my fries and Filet-o-Fish, but think "I sure don't want that again for another month or two!"
BF eats meat, but I'm the primary cook and he's not fussy, so he mostly eats what I eat. He has said that he doesn't really notice the absence of meat in my meals because I use lots of meaty vegetables and such. I cook with lots of beans, tofu, nuts, mushrooms, zucchini, avocados, dairy, thick sauces, rich spices, that sort of thing that, that feels like meat when you eat it. To quote BF "Yeah, she's mostly vegetarian, but she's not a salad-eating vegetarian, so it's good!"

If I could never eat meat or dairy products again, life wouldn't be worth living. I like salad, some cooked vegetables, fruit, and bread as much as the next person, but red meat is, as Alan Jackson would say, real food. I hate the texture of beans and the taste of nuts. If all spices except onion and garlic and those spices that belong in apple pie disappeared off the face of the earth, I wouldn't miss them.

According to a spokesperson from McDonald's, there are no fillers in their hamburgers, just lean meat:

spokesperson Jane Hulbert:

"McDonald's hamburgers are 100 percent pure domestic beef without fillers or seasonings. To maintain our customers' expectations and preference for lean, flavorful hamburgers, we carefully select fine cuts of grain fed beef and leaner cuts from dairy cattle. This is a typical combination for quality ground beef. More importantly, we have found that this combination results in a flavorful hamburger that also has a significantly lower percentage of fat (20 percent) than the government limits (30 percent)."

http://askville.amazon.com/Mcdonald%27s-hamburgers-Filet-O%27-Fish-made-real-meat-purport/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=4023040

Wow... TOS, you and I have absolutely opposite taste in food. I grew up in a meat and potatoes household (we raised cattle when I was a kid) but now my spice rack overfloweth with unpronounceable names and bright colours. My recipe book has three different types of creamy curry sauces in it (two coconut and one milk) to suit my mood. My BF has no clue what half the ingredients in the cupboard are for, but he knows I make delicious food, so he just smiles and nods when I say something like "write dried mustard seeds on the grocery list".
I suspect we both eat healthy, balanced diets, but in totally different ways!

I must share my favourite spinach salad with you all... Fresh spinach, with crumbled blue cheese, slivers of apple tossed in cinnamon, and pecans that have been pan-roasted with lots of cumin until the stray cumin browns, then served with pear dressing (I usually buy it, but I have made my own pear dressing and it was good too). OMG it's fabulous. The first time I made it BF got up from the table, came around to my side, gave me a HUGE hug and kiss and said "Wow! Dear, this is amazing! This is the best salad I have ever eaten!"

Sure, they start with lean beef, but then they proceed to cook it in whatever that foul smelling greasy gray stuff is and slap it between buns that I'm fairly sure contain more drywall dust than flour. So any good choices made by selecting lean beef go right out the window!
I also am not sure where you're going with this? Are you arguing that since McDonald's puts beef in their patties, McDonald's is good for you? Or just arguing against Ima who thinks that they aren't made from beef?

Ima, my guess would be that it's the strange greasy gray stuff that upsets your stomach, not the actual patty itself. I have many friends who worked at McDonald's in high school and they all said that until the burger hits the gray stuff, it looks and smells pretty normal.

I don't know what is more funny about this post - the fact that Ima and TOS are arguing about the nutritional content of a Big Mac, or the fact that I am totally in TOS's camp on this one!?!

I love veggies, and Ceph your salad sounds to die for, but I would give them all up for a big, fat, medium rare steak. Or better yet, prime rib with a really salty rub on it. THEN comes the loaded baked potato. Cheese is my best friend, and one of the few things DH and I can agree on food wise.

Many days I will crave fresh fruit or a salad, but offer me a dinner out and we will likely be having steak . . . or maybe Thai. I do love spices!

OK people, have mercy, your posts made me hungry, I am off to make some goood breakfast :)

Ceph,

I am just pointing out that McD's burgers are all beef. I would rather have a hamburger (or better yet, steak) from a sit-down family restaurant.

Justmartha,

It's good to know we agree on something. I haven't had prime rib in years, but now I am really craving some.

Macdonalds burgers are made from 100 percent beef. Lungs :) hooves :) assorted unnamed body parts :)

Eating an occasional MD burger wont hurt you, but a steady diet certainly will. Of course, I cant understand at all why anyone would WANT to eat a md burger :) They are just nasty.

I am on the fruit and vegetable lover side of the equation. I eat meat rarely. My husband, on the other hand, is firmly on the meat side. We could probably go out to dinner and order one meal, because I would eat what I like and he would eat what he likes,and between us, we could finish the plate.

My stepson and most of my natural kids with the exception of one meat eater, are on the fruit and veggie side. Stepdaughter is in her own world. If its not fast food, or junk food, she wont eat it. She never eats fruit. SHe doesnt eat cooked meals. She turns her nose at salad. Her life consists of pizza and soda, and chocolate. A full meal to her is a md burger and fries.

I could probably live without meat although the occasional medium rare steak is definitely a treat but I don't think I'd make it without dairy. Or pasta for that matter. And not fat free dairy either, 2% milk is about the best i can manage but full fat cheese, yogurt, sour cream.

BF eats fish and fowl but not pork, beef, other red meat and he keeps hinting that it'd be healthier for me to give it up too... i really think he just wants to make sure i'm not going to try to start feeding it to him. I mean he's probably right it would be healthier but he smokes(!) so i don't think he needs to lecture me about my health... plus i don't think he's **that** fanatical about the meat thing, he cooked some greens once that were delicious and i asked how he made them, fat-back was mentioned... um, sweetie, i don't think it's a trout that grew that fat on it's back...

now let me go throw some milk and yogurt (ok and some fruit) in a blender and make myself a smoothie...

"According to a spokesperson from McDonald's,"

and weren't there spokespeople from the tabacco industry that said smoking doesn't hurt anyone???

No offense to all the McD lovers out there, but I can eat a burger at Wendy's, In & Out, or Red Robin, and not get sick. Two bites from Mc Donalds's and I'm nauseated. Grease or beef, I still say YUCK. (and I used to love the big mac as a kid!) and I used to work for several fast food places, including McDonalds, Taco Bell & Wendy's. Wendy's is the ONLY place at the time that made their own patties with fresh ground beef. I think In & Out does too. Taco Bell USED to fry their meat & boil their own beans, now everything comes in a 'boil in bag' that you don't know what is in it. (even their veggies are prepackaged now, they used to be cut & diced daily) I'm not a big 'fast food' person. Once you see how things are done behind the scenes, it changes how you feel about what you see in the commercials.

ohhh . . . an In & Out burger. You're killin' me Ima! We don't have them here and every once in a while I just CRAVE one.

TOS, when I was PG with my first son I craved prime rib like nobody's business. It was all I could think about. Come to find out my anemia had hit with a vengeance and my body was trying to tell me something. I've always been slightly anemic but pregnancy made it much worse. Have you been tested? Maybe your body is trying to tell you something as well?

My hemoglobin has always been within normal range, but when I was pregnant I could have eaten hamburgers morning, noon, and night. Now I would settle for just noon and night.

quirk,

I agree with you about the dairy products. I can barely stomach 2%, but I would much rather drink "real" milk.

I buy gifts for my XH from my kids sometimes they are clothes or things I know that he needs. My husband doesn't care and the kids like that they get something for their dad that he needs.

OMG TOS - you and my husband both on the burger thing. So I have to ask, what do you out on it besides meat and a bun.

Sorry this has gone so far OT . . . :-)

It is a bit odd but on the other hand my SD's BM has bought my bio son presents. In turn we have given her youngest daughter (about the same age as my bio son) the duplicate toys we recieved from showers and his bday. We thought this was best since she is the only person we know with a child so close in age.

justnotmartha,

Usually just lettuce and ketchup, but once in a while bacon, tomato, and provolone or Swiss (anything but cheddar) cheese. Banana slices are good too (alone, not with any of the other toppings).

Awww - you aren't as *bad* as DH. He has cheddar, bacon and mayo. NO veggies what so ever. I can pile stuff on mine to the sky, but my favorite would be lettuce, onions, mushrooms, bacon and blue cheese. Banana huh? I might just have to take your word on that one . . . :-)

Midwest - I sent a bunch of baby stuff I still had over to SD's mom when she had a baby last year . . . it too seemed the nice thing to do. Besides, I knew with 12 years between her daughters she wouldn't have saved much!

TOS-I know! And what's the deal with fat free sour cream, worse yet fat free ice cream? Can people not see the "cream" right there in the name? How can it be "cream" with no fat? crazy...

Back to the original topic, my parents don't give each other gifts, but my dad makes leb cookies every christmas and always sends some to my grandparents (mom's parents, his ex-in-laws) because he knows they like them. My parents have been divorced 25 years. This christmas I was tasked with apologies/excuses because they (dad and sm) were in the middle of moving/remodeling and hadn't done christmas baking, so no gift of cookies... I think weird or not just depends on the motivation...

The ex hasnt given DH any presents ... (It's funny I mentioned reading about this thread and how that would not be okay and he just laughed and said that would be assuming I would accept a 'gift' from her)... So, she hasnt given any presents but she did steal my shirt once... a really nice shirt that I only had the opportunity to wear once... I was highly poed when I found out. But, that turned out to just be another thing that I let go with her... why couse ourselves more drama...