About EvenFlo Smart Steps:
Evenflo is putting a spotlight on toddler nutrition with its innovative new Smart Steps™ toddler feeding line, designed to specifically address childhood obesity and eating disorders. Developed in collaboration with top nutrition experts from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Smart Steps offers parents a simple solution to fostering lifelong healthy eating habits by providing products for each age and stage of a child’s eating development.
Through the use of an Eating Arc, Smart Steps addresses the various ways in which parents load their toddlers’ plates with food at mealtime and offers specific product solutions from one of three categories: Knowing Portions, Exploring Food, and Serving Myself. Each category is centered on basic principles that help nurture healthy eating habits and align with the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) guidelines related to toddler feeding.
Our Story:
We are the typical family, and when I say typical I mean overweight with little knowledge of proper nutrition and feeding portions. We’re often too busy to really read product labels and often cook meals that you would not exactly call healthy. Our first line of defense for our eating habits is to learn portion control. Our son is much like I was as a kid, extremely picking about eating. After years of having a child that wouldn’t eat anything more than spaghetti and grilled cheese, it was very surprising to have our daughter be an all out eater of everything edible. Kaydence, at 19 months old, has quickly developed poor eating habits because of our willingness to give her as much as she’ll eat, which often results in adult portion sizes. We realized our mistake early when her pediatrician let us know that her weight gain had significantly increased, pushing her into the 95th percentile in the weight category. This is up from the 20th percentile just 3 months before. This is where the Evenflo Smart Steps line comes in to help.
Mom Approved:
Snack Stackers, Magic Labels & Discovery Spoon
Our first discovery was from the Knowing Portions line of products. Instead of giving our toddler Kaydence her usual adult sized plate of food we decided to make her a more appropriate sized taco salad in the Snack Stacker bowl. I’ll admit, at first I was sure I was going to be refilling this bowl at least twice. I slid in two triangles of flour tortilla, adding a smaller helping of taco meat, and topped it off with shredded cheese, tomatoes, black olives, and a dab of sour cream. I was surprised to find that it was the perfect amount of food for her. Limiting the size of her meal helped me realize just how much I’ve been over feeding my daughter.
Once dinner finished up, I took the other two Snack Stackers and filled one with leftovers and the other with a portion of spaghetti sauce leftovers from the previous night. We filled out one of the Magic Labels and popped them right on top of the Snack Stackers so we knew what was hidden in the little bowls and they were ready for 2 lunches this week. The idea behind the Magic Labels is that they will easily dissolve during washing so you don’t have to back and peel and scrape the label back off. Of course I had to try this out for myself. A few minutes in warm dish water and the label actually did dissolve away leaving a clean lid.
What I love most about this collection is not only is it teaching me how to feed my daughter the correct portions but they are convenient products. Each Snack Stacker comes with an easy pop on lid for food storage and the lid snaps right onto the bowl base while in use giving the cup a wider base to prevent spilling.
Insulated Cup
One of our biggest issues with sippy cups is that our daughter takes her time when it comes to drinking her milk. One sippy cup can typically last 4 hours. Unfortunately, I worry that the milk has been at air temperature too long and we waste quite a bit. The Smart Steps Insulated Cup comes with a soft, neoprene sleeve with built in gripper handles. After dinner we gave it a fill with a cup of cold milk just to see how well it would keep our daughter’s milk cool. Two hours later we checked back to find her milk was still relatively cold. My daughter really like the soft tip spout but we did find it dripped milk if left in a non-upright position for too long. In the end, we decided this is the perfect sippy cup for travel and running errands when you won’t be back in a few hours.
Mom Improvements:
The products themselves are perfect, no complaints there. What we did have an issue with is the line of defense used in the product packaging. It took two adults, a knife, a pair of scissors, and a freshly gouged knuckle to break into the Snack Stackers packaging.
Parent Resources:
Even Flo SmartSteps offers some great resources for parents about healthy eating for toddlers that I particularly found interesting:
Buy It:
The entire Evenflo Smart Steps feeding line is available in stores at Babies R Us.
I love the fact that the insulated cup keeps things cold that long! So now when the cup “comes up missing”, you wont have to replace the drink when it is found
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She is PRESH!! it was a couple yrs ago in a magazine when i saw picture of what a meal size should be for a small child and i was shocked at how little of food it was (compared to what i was giving) Our kids use small plates so the plate looks full of food (on a big plate it looks funny so empty) Some of the kids will go back for seconds of there favorite item, but the smaller portions has also saved us from a lot of wasted food.
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I would be interested in trying this with cold foods but I really don’t see what the difference is between this and pyrex. I am not one who likes to microwave anything plastic so I don’t know if I am sold on these.
The cup is a great idea. I do like that one.
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